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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
October Archived
1 November 2019
We've just archived Volume 8 Number 10 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 17 Features, 34 commented News stories, 28 Editor's Notes (which included 199 items of interest), one review and three site notes for a total of 83 stories.
With those 83 stories, we published 191 images and nine stories with gear specifications.
While the review count may seem anemic, it's actually a bit misleading. We also reviewed the Michael Jang Retrospective and continued our series of Olympus lens reviews embedded in our features. So there's more there than meets the bean counter's eye.
READERSHIP numbers were unusually difficult to interpret this month. As we've pointed out before, as absolute data they are pretty worthless. They are inflated by indexing and deflated by feeds, among other vagaries. But as relative numbers, they can indicate trends.
Generally, we are still acquiring many more readers than we lose.
Google, sweetheart, you're not nearly as smart as you think you are. A little humility would serve you (and us) well.
This month, however, even the relative trends are misleading because we had to severely ratchet back the site indexing Google was suddenly indulging in. Google, sweetheart, you're not nearly as smart as you think you are. A little humility would serve you (and us) well.
By "severely" we mean Google now knows about our content about a day after we publish it. That hurts readership that depends on Google discovering us first, of course, but we'd rather provide our content to regular readers rather than bots. Consequently bandwidth fell to a third of what it was when the site was threatened with a shutdown for exceeding our alotted bandwidth.
That brings us back to the readership levels we enjoyed earlier this year before the Google attack. Oddly enough, with a day of data left to collect we had about 10 percent more unique site visitors than last month and the most since June. We served well over half a million stories to actual readers this month as well.
OUR MOST POPULAR STORY was, not surprisingly, our review of Elements 2020 followed by (surprisingly) several Horns and the story about the Christie's auction benefiting the Aperture Foundation.
ON THE SITE, we introduced a new index we call Highlights. The idea occurred to us as a way to point out our more important stories through the years without overloading the main headline page.
We built it from the subset of carousel thumbnails we used to retain after copying the complete set for a month to the headline page named for the year. So it's fun to look at and quite a different experience than the Slide Show index, which we find more colorful.
We also introduced our Keyboard Maestro application Napkin for accumulating text notes, doodling and applying filters to small images. Because it can edit images, it's not a bad learning tool for digital photography, particularly for kids.
Throw an image on its canvas and try the posterization option that activates a slider. Then use the slider to reduce or expand the number of tones in the image. You'll never wonder what tones are again.
Same thing with the three hue correction sliders. Pick one and try it out to see how to add or remove a color cast. And learn the complimentary colors.
There's more fun with duotones and other effects but learning about tones and color can be hard work. Napkin makes it pretty simple.
COMING UP, we have a seven-part review starting in November, plus a few other reviews, so that count should get healthy. We're no longer worried about exceeding our bandwidth, so stayed tuned for even more useful content from us.