Mysterious traffic

I was just looking at my blog's stats and in the last few days people have taken an interest in my post about a sunrise at dead horse point. The amount of traffic is quite extraordinary. This is just a day:

This is the statistics on the smugmug gallery that the images are hosted from:

That's with only 1/3 of March 2 done by now, so it seems that sunday will be a 4000 image day too. Somebody big must have started linking to it as these images don't draw a lot of traffic normally. Strangely, I cannot figure out what triggered the traffic as google analytics does not show the origin of the traffic. As the graph above shows, my smugmug site (which serves up the images) shows the traffic quite well, but of course thinks it comes from my blog. These are some of my favorite images and it's nice if people enjoy them but I am still curious where the traffic came from.

Cradled. Buy a print.
Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at 24 mm, f/16, 1/6s, ISO 100.

EDIT: 3/2/14. This is probably a consequence of referer spam. Traffic generated by bots hoping to generate links back to them. Evil spammers.

Browsers used on this blog

Is this a reflection of your geekiness?

(From Google Analytics for this site - a truly awesome and free resource)
The high occurrence of Safari is probably a reflection of the photographer crowd visiting this site, and Firefox and Chrome for the more computer geeks, but the very small amount of IE users visiting (only 17%) is a surprise to me. I use Safari, Firefox and Chrome myself and never use IE even on Windows machines but most of the people I know that use Windows still default to IE.

Dynamic views

I just read that blogger (the site that I use for blogging) now offers dynamic views of all blogs that are public. This works on this blog therefore. The views are interesting but it often doesn't seem to pickup the images very well in the snapshot icons. I like the sidebar view but you can choose several different layouts from the top popup. I wonder if these views will be customizable because the blog suddenly loses all context.

Timelapse of earthquake data

Jeffrey Friedl, well known for his work on Lightroom plugins and who lives in Japan, created a quite revealing timelapse animation of data from accelerometers present everywhere in Japan of a whole week of data of the big quake and many aftershocks. Aftershocks is a bad word for this as many were quite large in their own right. Check it out on his blog.

New Layout

As you might have noticed, I did some major updates to the page layout on this site. The main change is that I flipped around the color scheme from what it was and changed the banner graphic to an image from sunrise on the Cathedral Spires in Rocky Mountain National Park. I started from a blogger supplied template that I did some major hacking on to make it work for a photography website. I don't want tiny columns, and the sans serif should be Helvetica, not the ugly arial clone that is generally used for this purpose. I also added some drop shadows here and there.

Photos from Rikki Ward

I saw this linked on the superb City Snaps blog. Photography by Rikki Ward. Her webpage is here. Fantastic people photography on the streets in India, Eastern Europe, and the US. Well worth a check.

Minor site redesign

I've been playing with the CSS template for this blog in order to generate a clearer layout for the site. I wasn't happy with the optical separation between blog posts and the general fit and finish. As you can see, I now have a (more than) full-width top image and I changed some minor elements. This all looks fantastic on the browsers I have access to, namely Safari, Firefox, and Chrome but I do not know what it will look like in IE. I know that the drop shadows I added to the site title and other headers (which are CSS3 properties I understand) probably will not work in Internet Explorer, but they look very nice on the browsers that everybody should be using. Let me know what you think and also if you find any bugs in the layout. The screenshot below shows what it should look like. The framed image on the right will indeed cut off if you decrease the width of the browser window too much. Don't know yet how to solve that but this only arises when people have very low resolutions set on their displays.



EDIT: should have gone for a Droste Cocoa can effect.

High resolution landscapes - new blog post at inside Lightroom

I started blogging at O'Reilly's Inside Lightroom blog. I wrote a rather long post about making high resolution landscapes with a cheap 6MP DSLR. Check it out!. I talk about how I made this image from a bunch of handheld shots.

I linked to a gallery of images made this way in a previous blog post.

Points about copyright

James Duncan Davidson in his blog makes some good points about copyright protection for your photographs in the US. While copyright is automatic for everyone in the US that creates original works, it is far from automatic that you will get reimbursed for any infringement of your copyright. We have seen now many times big media companies lifting photos from flickr and using them without permission and flaunting the holder to do anything about it. If you have never registered for copyright with the copyright office, you might not be able to get more than a pittance back that won't even cover your legal costs! This is a sad state of affairs especially in the age of social networks and "sharing" of your photos online.

My old blog

Just to aggregate a little, here are some links to some older posts I made before on my previous blogsite.
How to correct lens distortion using free tools.

Some Aperture (Mac OS X system RAW converter) vs Lightroom comparisons.

I wrote more than once about that.

Compiling ufraw (a very high quality freeware RAW converter based on dcraw) on Mac OS X.

Trying the blogger thing

After blogging for a while using Apple's iWeb (see my old blog here), I got so frustrated with it that I am looking for something better. This might be it. I write mostly about photography and especially digital photography. One of my favorite things to do used to be the old chemical photography in the darkroom. Needless to say, that had some problems in the sense that it takes a lot of preparation and effort and it takes a long time between the shot and seeing the actual photograph. Digital is, in those respects, much better. Immediate feedback, accurate colour, easy road onto the web, etc. There are many things I do miss about the old way, such as dynamic range, versatility and especially resolution. I am very happy though with my Nikon DSLR and for most purposes, the resolution is good enough. Anyway, for this blog, I'll revisit a few subjects I put on my older, mostly undiscovered by the world ;-), blog and thrust into new "uncharted" waters.