50,000 views

A bit of a milestone, the usual Pride-oriented surge in hits has meant that the photos on my Flickr account just passed 50,000 cumulative views. Although unlikely to be troubling the Alexa rankings anytime soon, it's pretty decent for one guy with a camera he bought three years ago and had to learn what "aperture" meant. I think I've a realistic view of my ability now and the work I still have to do but it is nice to see the distance travelled to date.

Cheers to anyone who's ever appeared in one of my photos, especially if you didn't really want to. Cheers to anyone who's used one of my photos, in print or online, whether you paid me or not. Cheers to anyone who's given my photography a kind word, or indeed honest critique. Cheers to the many beautiful places who've given me someting worth photographing and to anyone who's stood, danced, partied, marched or rioted in front of my lens.

Cheers guys.

In fact, not only did Pride & Rushcart tip me over the 50,000 hits line but boosted me all the way to, at time of writing 73,000 views. That is to say that I got nearly a 50% boost to my views in the space of a week.



I'd noticed that my account seemed to be getting more hits for innocuous searches on various search engines of late, including Flickr itself. It's almost as though my visibility had increased. That, combined with the two large events over the bank holiday weekend seem to have been a perfect storm resulting in the hits spike.

Time well spent?

Encouraged by recent HDR successes, I took the scenic route home after work (having taken my tripod along) and tried to recreate early token HDR experimentation more seriously. The temperature is below 0 here at the moment and I couldn't feel my fingers by the time I got home. The tripod did its job but I got the photos onto my computer to find that the exposures (a number of them long, since this was after dark) all had massive streaks, specs, smears etc. from crap on my lens. Lesson learned: invest in a lens brush and look after your kit.

The other factor that makes the shots difficult is that I was in the city using my 11mm Tokina lens and the sheer number of lights in the location combined with the all-seeing lens made it very difficult to avoid profound lens flare. The lens hood may have helped to some degree on a few of the shots so I'll remember to take it with me next time.

So there we go: an evening of disappointing photos but lessons learned.