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.

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.

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.

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.

I got spammed

It seems I got spammed on this blog on my most popular post. There were a few posts there that I had to delete (before turning on moderation) because, even though they attempted to stroke my ego, were just links to sites selling viagra and peddling pay-day loans. Oh how I hate spammers. There is a special place in hell for these people. I don't like having to turn on moderation but the volume of crap is simply too high.

Safari and blogger

Well so far I only found one major annoyance, which is that composing in blogger doesn't work right in Safari. Things like adding an image will not work at all. Luckily the site works great in Firefox, my second choice in browsers. I was also annoyed to find out that if you let blogger scale the image, it forgets to include the icc profile in the scaled image's icc profile. Very bad!. iWeb at least maintained the profile if the image was tagged with one. Even with that, I think I'll stick with it for the time being. iWeb is simply impossible for photographers as it has a nasty bug where uploaded images suddenly have little white lines on the top or the bottom, forcing you to resize the image by 1 pixel increments (or decrements) until it gets it right. Of course, you can only seen this after you upload the site. Perhaps Apple will get this right in the rumored new version of iLife as they marked my submitted bug on this as duplicate, but I am not holding my breath.

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.