Welcome to 2013

Hello, every­one. Wel­come to 2013. I’m back from my hol­i­day hia­tus of blog­ging, but I actu­ally spent quite a bit of time work­ing on the blog. I decided that a new year deserves a new begin­ning in more ways than one.

What’s New with Me

Back in Novem­ber of 2011, I had the mis­for­tune of being laid-​off from my day job work­ing in IT for one of the big play­ers in the Defense indus­try. I had a bit of sev­er­ance pay and some money in the bank, so I decided to once again return to self-​employment. In some ways, I enjoyed it very much. In oth­ers, I missed work­ing with oth­ers. Although I was able to build a liv­ing for myself, I have to admit that it was a bit of a lonely life. It’s nice to avoid the com­mute and office pol­i­tics, but hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with dogs every day just isn’t quite sat­is­fy­ing. Besides, they never helped in the business.

Start­ing tomor­row, I’ll once again go back to work for another busi­ness as Direc­tor of Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy. It’s a field that I enjoy very much. In fact, com­put­ers and IT are what swayed me away from my high school plans of going to pho­tog­ra­phy school and becom­ing a full-​time pho­tog­ra­pher. I’ve been able to enjoy both of these pas­sions and profit from each in more ways than financial.

I’ll be work­ing in the edu­ca­tion indus­try. Since we have schools over a large part of the state, I’ll be spend­ing some time on the road. That’s one of the issues I’m fac­ing that’s giv­ing me rea­son to con­sider changes to my blog­ging schedule.

The other issue came from a review of my posts over the past year. I like to mea­sure things to see what works and what doesn’t. What I found was some­thing that should be pretty obvious.

Arti­cles like this one — Three Ways to Make Your HDR Pho­tos Really Suck — gar­nered much more atten­tion and feed­back than posts where I sim­ply shared a photo and a story to go with it. My intent when I started this blog was sim­ply to share my own pho­to­graphic jour­ney. Visit a nice place, work with an inter­est­ing model, take a photo and share the story. I’ve enjoyed doing that for the past few years. Along the way, I’ve learned quite a few things, too.

That’s why I’ve decided on a change in strat­egy for this blog. It’s bet­ter to share what I know than to share what I’ve done.

As part of my effort to share what I know, I’m going to take a bit more time to cre­ate my posts. I read­ily admit that I spent far too many evenings work­ing on a photo and writ­ing a story to post for the next day just before I went to bed. Some of those posts were less than awe­some, too.

I don’t want to con­tinue try­ing to meet a self-​imposed week­day sched­ule that gen­er­ates hit-​or-​miss con­tent. One of the things I’ve learned about blog­ging is that you don’t have to write a post every day to build an audi­ence or gen­er­ate traf­fic. Instead, you have to pro­vide qual­ity con­tent that is inter­est­ing or use­ful. I’m much more fond of the idea of being use­ful and shar­ing some­thing that may help folks instead of just striv­ing to cre­ate five posts a week.

Build­ing a Blog­ging Empire

There’s another rea­son for cut­ting back on the posts here. It’s because I’ll be shar­ing more on some other blogs. That hol­i­day hia­tus over the last cou­ple of weeks kept me busy build­ing other blogs and giv­ing them a new sense of pur­pose, too. Here are the other sites where I’ll spend my time.

WBEEM — There are some folks who fol­low my pho­tog­ra­phy only for the pho­tos. They don’t really care about the tech­ni­cal issues behind it. With the changes I have in mind for this site, I don’t want to leave them dis­sat­is­fied. That’s why I’m going to share my pho­tos, and per­haps a story, on this site. It’s a place to post my pho­tos and occa­sional thoughts with­out delv­ing behind the scenes.

Aper­ture vs Light­room — I started this site as a spin-​off from this blog because a great deal of the traf­fic I received here came from peo­ple search­ing for “aper­ture vs light­room” in Google (or some vari­ant of that phrase). In fact, it’s still one of the biggest draws of traf­fic I get from Google. A funny thing started to hap­pen recently. I’m gen­er­at­ing more traf­fic on that site than I am here. The spin-​off is eclips­ing my “main” site. Not sur­pris­ing, though. Peo­ple find the arti­cles use­ful and it’s grow­ing in pop­u­lar­ity. That’s part of the moti­va­tion for my changes here, both in con­tent and in sched­ule. I only post there once or twice per week, but vis­its to the site are grow­ing at an enor­mous pace. I may have to bring on some Guest Authors to keep up with the demand.

Unknown Blog­ger — What can I say? It’s a blog about blog­ging. Run­ning this site and the oth­ers, I’ve learned as much about blog­ging as I have about pho­tog­ra­phy. My orig­i­nal idea was to use it as a con­tent repos­i­tory for the blog­ging classes I occa­sion­ally teach for the Har­mon School of Pho­tog­ra­phy, since there’s often more con­tent to go into than we can fit in the allot­ted class time. Then I decided there was no rea­son to limit it to just that group of folks. It’s a new site and only has a cou­ple of posts right now, but I have plenty of infor­ma­tion and expe­ri­ences to share. Like every other blog in the world, you have to start build­ing it one post at a time. If you’re inter­ested in Word­Press blog­ging, I invite you to join me there.

Orlando Local — This is one that’s been a mis­fit for me, but I’m not giv­ing up yet. I started it with much the same pur­pose I had here. It was a place to write about my expe­ri­ence, just on a local level. Turns out that isn’t very inter­est­ing, though. As with the other sites, my goal is to make it more use­ful to peo­ple who live in or visit the Orlando area. It won’t be a news or event site. There are plenty of those. I’ll fig­ure it out, though.

The IT Blog — I haven’t launched this one quite yet, but I’m also build­ing a blog for peo­ple who work in the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy field. Don’t con­fuse that with a technology/​gadget blog, though. It’s a site for best prac­tices in the IT busi­ness. Many of my col­leagues who work in IT are con­fused about their pur­pose. They think that IT is about tech­nol­ogy. It’s not. IT is about busi­ness — cre­at­ing busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties, expand­ing busi­ness mar­kets and pro­tect­ing busi­ness resources. The prob­lem isn’t that so many in the IT busi­ness don’t know what they’re doing. The prob­lem is that they don’t truly know why their doing it.

Most of these sites have a com­mon appear­ance, and that’s by design. Although most of these sites have a dif­fer­ent niche topic, they have a com­mon pur­pose. They’re here to help. By the end of the year, I’ll know if I suc­ceeded in my objective.

A Few Other Changes

I’ve made a few other changes to the site. Some more changes may be on the way. The Dis­qus com­ment­ing sys­tem may be on its way out the door. I’ve added an SSL cer­tifi­cate for some future down­load plans and per­haps some subscription-​based con­tent. I revamped the tem­plate for my e-​mail sub­scribers because the old one was just so wretchedly ugly.

Speak­ing of e-​mail sub­scribers, I’ve done some­thing rather rash. I added a pop-​up to encour­age sub­scrip­tions. Although there are blog vis­i­tors who absolutely detest these things, I’ve selected one that I hope will be the least obtru­sive kind. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) appear until you’ve reached the bot­tom of a post. Even then, it should only appear once (per machine you use) and then not re-​appear for 90 days. If you sub­scribe, then it should’t appear again at all.

Why have I cre­ated this mon­ster? Because the truth is that there are more peo­ple who like to have con­tent deliv­ered to their e-​mail inbox than those who visit the site or sub­scribe via RSS. I’m try­ing to pro­vide a few dif­fer­ent avenues to let folks read what I have to share.

The Oblig­a­tory Photo

I can’t go cold-​turkey and cre­ate a post on a pho­tog­ra­phy blog with­out a photo or at least some­thing about pho­tog­ra­phy. That just won’t do.

This hand­some lit­tle puppy is Milo, my labrador retriever. Don’t be fooled by his appear­ance. He’s not this calm or sullen. In fact, he’s becom­ing a real pain in my ass. Even so, I love the furry lit­tle beastie. I also though he’d be a good sub­ject to test my Nikon D800.

I used a sin­gle SB-​900 on camera-​left using a Las­to­lite Ezy­Box with a grid. Not just any Las­to­lite Ezy­Box, but a Joe McNally sig­na­ture Ezy­Box with the white inte­rior, because it’s creamier. That sounds either deli­cious or dis­gust­ing, so don’t dwell on it for too long. Two white foam boards on camera-​right pro­vided fill.