PhotographyBanzai.com

It’s getting close to October. That was the month I started this site last year. While I’ve had a few different photography sites over the years, this one has been the largest by far in content and page visits. I thought it would be fun to show some stats about the site from October 23rd 2010 – August 2011, so basically 11 months of information from Google Analytics to go through. The site was linked up with Google Analytics on October 23rd 2010 and I have the stats spanning from then until today (August 26th 2011). The statistics through my webhost are a lot higher, but that’s due to Google filtering out all of the extras like search engine bots and anyone who opts out of Google Analytics (yeah, it is possible to opt-out). Visits: 17,279 Absolute Unique Visits: 13,987 Page Views: 26,765 Here is a graph of daily visits: The two large spikes were Otakon 2011 and Chicago Comic Con 2011. Showing the monthly stats shows a significant improvement most months. Without large conventions...

I’ve been spending a lot of time setting up a new website where I will host a good deal of images. It will use Zenfolio as a back-end and have the ability to allow for buying downloads and ordering prints. Before that while going through my 1300 or so cruise images I setup a few standard processes for processing images so that they look how I feel they should. When processing images the way I do, it takes a good deal of time. I always am trying to find ways to speed up the process, but on the other hand I always want to have each image tweaked to my eye. Here are a few points to my (post) processing process: I shoot images in RAW (DNG) format with flat colors. I use my old license of Photoshop CS2 on Linux through Wine. I recently bought a copy of “Noise Ninja” plugin/standalone software.  Steps for post processing that result in finished full resolution pictures (meaning I don’t shrink these as they will be for my Zenfolio gallery): Open a block of images in Photoshop (say 50 a...