This shot makes me smile. The camera was able to catch the girls during a great moment of joy at the skating rink. Do you remember days like this in your childhood, before the stress and worries of adult life set in?
Special thanks to the fine folks over at New West Network. They selected this shot to use recently on their home page:
Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/60 second, f/5, ISO 400
This jellyfish was photographed at the Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy Utah. I wonder why most aquariums feature their jellys in blue environments such as this. Is it strictly for cosmetic presentation or is there a another reason?
Canon 30D, Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens – 1/40 second, f/1.8, ISO 400
Photographed on a cold winter day in Temple Square, Salt Lake City Utah.
Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/50 second, f/13, ISO 100
I spent some time yesterday afternoon (Valentine’s Day) with my wife photographing at our daughters’ school. The school was holding its annual Sixth Grade Dance and we were asked to shoot portraits of the kids in their Sunday best. My favorite shot of the day was the first one taken. I asked Elisabeth to step in for a moment so I could test the lighting, and as she did her friends were laughing at her. Her relaxed fun expression made for a great spontaneous capture.
I processed the shot in black & white with a bit of colorization applied in Photoshop (the subtle gold tone in her hair). Her outfit and the seamless background work well with a somewhat high key presentation.
Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/30 second, f/4, ISO 100
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 3.2 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 100
Okay, I get it. In the past three weeks I’ve only posted one photograph with a person in it, and that was just a shot of some guy holding a sign at a basketball game. So enough with the birds, smoke, fish and lightbulbs – today I’m posting a portrait!
My family enjoyed the privilege of having this young man spend the evening with us last night while his mom and dad were out. He’s quite the charmer, so I grabbed the Canon and snapped a few shots. I made this capture from across the room with a rather long lens while he was playing with my daughter.
Canon 30D, Canon 300 f/2.8L IS lens – 1/50 second, f/2.8, ISO 100
Today marks seven days since my post of a burning lightbulb made #1 on the news aggregate website digg.com. I have always heard about “The Digg Effect” (a term to refer to the huge influx of traffic generated by a story on digg) and wondered how much traffic is generated. Now I know.
Prior to February 5th, this website averaged around 300 – 400 visitors a day. While this is not a huge number, it had been gradually growing over the 14 month period of the site’s existence. Then the story hit on digg and here is what happened:
Monday February 5 – 126,742
Tuesday February 6 – 25,258
Wednesday February 7 – 12,199
Thursday February 8 – 6,211
Friday February 9 – 4,310
Saturday February 10 – 4,216
Sunday February 11 – 3,776
That’s 183,716 page loads from 158,312 unique visitors in the past week. If I remove my previous average of 300-400 per day, that is over 180,000 hits generated as a result of the digg story. Wow!
One thing I didn’t expect with the notoriety on digg was the amount of traffic from other websites that this would create. While digg generated most of the hits the first day or two, other sites began referring hits to me. Here is a breakdown of where the most of the traffic came from over the past seven days:
digg.com – 63.86%
reddit.com – 10.06%
direct – 5.40%
stumbleupon.com – 4.30%
monitor.hr – 2.25%
bluesnews.com – 1.38%
clicked.msnbc.msn.com – 1.35%
A frequent outcome of websites being dugg is that the server is unable to handle the huge increase in traffic. In my case, this traffic was approximately 10,000 hits per hour in the first 12 hours of being on the front page of digg. LeggNet.com handled the traffic extremely well with the only hiccup being a slight slowdown on Monday afternoon that required a reboot. Thankfully, I have unlimited bandwidth on my hosting account.
My hope from this experience is that some of the visitors that have found my site in the past week will continue visiting. The increase in comments and email has been great. Thank you.
-Rich
p.s. If you’d like to monitor LeggNet.com via RSS, please add http://leggnet.com/rss/leggnet.xml to your reader.
After all of the attention my post showing photos of lightbulbs burning out received last week, I thought I’d post another one. This capture shows the burning bulb a moment later than my earlier shots. The mushroom looking cloud (we’ll ignore other similarities) has floated up and is beginning to dissipate in this version. It is interesting to note that in nearly all of the photos the smoke plume is drifting to the right. I would guess that subtle airflow in the room is the reason.
To photograph this, I fired 8-10 shot bursts with my camera at 5 frames per second to increase my odds of capturing an interesting photo. I manually calculated the exposure after taking a few test shots. The only post processing I have done to this image is cropping, noise reduction and contrast adjustment (all in Photoshop CS2).
Links:
Previous LeggNet.com Post
Story on Digg.com
My Smoke Shots on Flickr
Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens – 1/640 second, f/4, ISO 100
Lone Eagle photographed in Farmington Bay, Utah.
Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f/4L lens with 1.4 extender – 1/800 second, f/5.6, ISO 100
This capture of a bald eagle was shot in the Centerville area North of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The stately bird was perched in a tree alongside a road near the Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area. The eagles are beginning to arrive in the area and will stay for most of the month of February. People have talked of seeing hundreds of the birds at the peak of the winter layover. On my recent visit, I was able to spot a couple dozen, though most were quite a distance from the road.
Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f/4L lens with 1.4 extender – 1/640 second, f/5.6, ISO 100
