It's Weekly Photo Tips second birthday!...

"Happy birthday Weekly Photo Tips... happy birthday to you"

When I wrote the first entry two 2 years ago today I had no idea where it would lead and in my wildest dreams I never thought it would be this much fun... I have you good people to thank. So, thank You, seriously.

The comments you leave and the emails you send are the best part, so please, keep 'em coming.

Here are some of the numbers from our second year:

The past 12 months have seen 61,107 visitors with 81,921 Page Views.

1,203 people have subscribed to Weekly Photo Tips.

Our very first month we had 117 visitors (and I thought that was amazing!), this past month we had 6,992.

You've come from 137 different countries.

The top 5 Countries are:

1. United States
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. Australia
5. Netherlands

And the bottom 5:

133. Niger
134. Swaziland
135. Uganda
136. Iraq
137. Ethiopia

How cool is it that people from Ethiopia and Swaziland have stopped by!

These are the 5 most viewed posts from the past year:

1. Review of Kevin Kubota's Lightroom 2 Training DVD
2. The Gritty Dave Hill Look
3. Get Your Free Lightroom Presets Here
4. A Bazillion Free Photoshop Actions
5. The Best Black & White Conversions You'll See

A few of the stats surprised me, like only 30% of the folks coming to the blog use Internet Explorer (thought IE dominated the browser world, but I thought wrong), and 2% of you actually get here via a dialup connection (I'll keep the images as small as possible!).

While year one averaged 2.6 posts per week, this year has seen an average of 4 posts weekly. I did not realize I had written (or bored you) quite so much.

Looking forward, these are the top 5 things I hope to accomplish in the upcoming year:

1. Redesign the blog for a more "professional" look (including a logo)
2. Establish a Weekly Photo Tips Flickr group and begin our photography assignments
3. Each month feature the work of fellow photographers (come back Monday for the first installment)
4. Begin a "Guest Blogger" segment
5. Publish more interviews from "prominent" photographers

If there are any whiz bang html/web type folks who would like to help tackle #1 please email me.I can promise you this, as much fun as this has been so far, the best is still out there waiting for us to catch up to it!

Here is the (simple) setup for the birthday cake, a Litepanels Micro on one side of the cake (more on the Litepanels Micro next week) and a home made white paper "kicker" on the other (printer paper taped to a cardboard foot), my camera was set on shutter priority @ 1/125th.