This is the 100th article on the blog, hooray!! Time for the first progress report.
I am very happy to run this blog. I am learning a lot, and though it takes a lot of time to find ideas, collect data/photos, mail people, write articles, translate articles, it is still fun to do this. My english is improving (a little) and I get to meet very friendly people.
The blog has evolved since the first article on November 12th: I understand as a blog about photography that people mainly want to see photos here so I stopped putting a single photo on articles; I have introduced recurrent articles like 365 projects and the photo of the week; the design of the blog has evolved too, with the adding of twitter, facebook and share buttons and some improvements in colors and layout. I have also developped tools to help me write articles (I am a -web- developper after all!).
The 365 thread is doing fine. When I started it I thought it was a great idea for a thread, and I was pretty sure I would find tons of great projects to introduce as I found so many pictures of 365 projects. It turns out interesting projects are not that common, I must be too difficult to convince.
I try to talk about running project only (I think I have managed to do that) including at least 5-6 photos I would happily display in the article. Also I avoid projects which do not have their dedicated page (set if on flickr), I don't want to have to search the whole portfolio of somebody to follow the project.
The hardest time for selecting projects was the beginning of 2011, because many people started at this time and thus had very few photos in there project.
I am very satisfied with the quality of the projects displayed here. If I had to chose my favourite, it would definitely be Brandon Huang's. Man this kid is gifted!
About feedback I must say I am a bit disappointed in the number of comments on the blog. The number of visitors is increasing but I have very few comments even when I explicitly ask for them. The internet is so flooded with information that we do not take the time to comment or even read everything. I know I do that too, when looking for subjects, advice, ideas on other sites I do not always read the article in its entirety or take the time to comment. So I guess this is normal! When talking with friends, the comment I get the most is "You are lazy on fridays huh?" (I have nice friends!). Yes, this is the day the photo of the week is published. I know I don't write a comment for this one, but this is because it speaks for itself! And trust me, it is not easy to find the photo of the week: the photo will have a dedicated article, and it will be displayed on the side for a whole week; this make me very hard to please! Plus I try to find photos of types which have not been in this section yet.
Most viewed articles include mainly collections of photos to be honest. 11 portraits in tribute to old people is very popular on french blog (#1 article), Danbo is popular on both and the silhouette collection is leading here. I particularly enjoy the Sarah Lee beach collection, when looking at it you just wish you were at the seaside...
As a conclusion I want to share a few articles I feel could have done better and may deserve a look.
Connie Zhou architecture photography: I was just impressed after visiting her website, with full screen photographs.
Hien's 365 and Olivia Bell's 365: both use very nice filters, results are lovely.
Get a home studio: I just want one! Maybe start with a light tent.
What about you? Do you have a favourite article? Would you like to tell me what to improve or avoid?
version française
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