This is my entry in the third and final installment of the Blog Statistics Project

Tibor over at photonovice.net has announced the final chapter of his project. So far he has asked What are the search terms used to reach your website? and What are your most popular articles? The last question is Where are you from?

So it’s back to Google Analytics for the answer – I have to say this has been a most useful tool for all three stages of the project.

Let me know in the comments where you are from and how you found Lilahpops :: Plunging into Photography – it will be interesting to compare this with the stats I’m about to list below.

Around the world

Here is the Map Overlay from Google Analytics showing my visitors for the last 12 months – yes, Lilahpops is now one year old. The darker the green the more visitors are from that country.

I was impressed to see that visits have come from 92 countries!

To break it down further I’ve listed the Top 5 countries and the percentage of traffic coming from each one:

• United States – 51.4%
• Australia – 14.2%
• United Kingdom – 8.9%
• Canada – 5.7%
• Germany – 1.8%

According to the stats 83.44% of total visitors are new to the site and the average length of each visit is 2min 34sec which isn’t too bad considering the ’surfing’ nature of the web.

How do you get here?

The pie chart below shows that most visitors have reached Lilahpops via referral sites and searches.

We can break it down a bit further:

• Google/Search – 41.8%
• Stumbleupon – 27%
• Direct – 10%
• Photography Voter – 3.3%
• Flickr – 2.5%

RSS subscribers are slowly growing too. This may be because it also includes my Flickr photos.

Do you fit the bill?

Does this sound like you? Are you from the United States or Australia? Did you do a Google search or or stumble across a post? Or perhaps you are a subscriber?

Let me know – I’d love to see if the stats translate into real life!

This is my entry in Neil Creek’s 3D photography Project

Click on the image to view a larger version at Flickr

What a challenge!

I found this a particularly challenging project. It was either me or the software making it so, because Neil’s instructions were very concise and easy to understand (including how to take a 3D image using his cha-cha method).

I took quite a few photos before I was happy with one that had 3D potential and used AnaBuilder for Mac to produce the 3D effect. The software wasn’t very user-friendly. Yes, it is free-ware and so I shouldn’t really complain, but I found it hard to use all the same. The preview option didn’t work so I had to rely on my very unsteady crossed-eyed technique to get the final result. Here’s hoping it’s vaguely 3D!

Challenging but a good learning experience.

Make sure you check out the submissions Neil has had so far, there are some excellent 3D examples in the mix.

Some great reading and discussions going on around the web lately:

Are you a female or male photographer?

Brian Auer at Epic Edits Weblog recently took a “gender poll” of his readers with the aim of determining if his web content is equally balanced for both genders or if the website is (unintentionally) more targeted towards his male readers. As a female visitor to his blog, I find his content does not have a gender bias at all, it simply contains excellent articles, tutorials and tips about photography. The poll has generated a lot of discussion on his blog. Considering many, if not the majority, of the responses have been from his female audience, I don’t think he’s got anything to worry about:

• What’s your gender?

The “it” camera

Digital Photography School also took a poll of its readers to find out what are the most popular cameras used, with a tight race between Canon and Nikon:

• What are the most popular cameras at DPS

Photography links you need

This is on many a website already but I’m going to mention it all the same – just in case you missed it:

• 60 photography links you can’t live without

Why you should take photos

In a series of posts, Amy at Lives Less Ordinary is exploring the whys of starting photography, continuing and why you should take photos. This is the second post in the series:

• The Fire of Images: Why I Continue To Take Photos

Photographing your holiday

At Your Photo Tips find out how to take better holiday snaps:

• Take better vacation photos

And finally … what is your photography goal?

Shawn Duffy has been asking himself the hard questions, where his photography is going and putting a plan together as a result.

• Thinking out loud

Related posts

• See other posts from the What I learned about photography this week series

Enjoy.

The results are in for the second part of the Blog Statistics Project being run by Tibor Radványi at photonovice.net. He has had a great response to this section and it is most interesting to see the diversity and variety of photography topics across the websites. Photography is certainly a broad and popular field!

If you find the results below of interest make sure to check out the third and final installment of Tibor’s epic Blog Statistics Project in which he asks “Where are you from?”

Just under two weeks to get your submissions in for the Vito BL Project.

We have a few participants so far and a couple more potentials are on their way; it all depends on whether or not the ol’ camera will co-operate.

I’ve been fascinated by the quality of the photos taken with the Vito BL. Not simply that a 50-odd year old camera still functions and takes great photos, but that the photographers of these vintage cameras are taking top-quality images. That by using equipment that doesn’t have the auto- buttons/focus/settings/speeds etc the users of these cameras really have to think about the photo – it’s not a simple point-and-shoot process.

So far, it seems that often, like myself, the Vito BL has been passed down the family line, mostly from fathers and grandfathers. My Voigtlander was passed on to me from my father, who bought it c.1959. I was impressed to find out, however, with one submission, that the Vito BL isn’t even considered a vintage camera. It is one of the newer cameras in that particular collection! Of course, eBay also play its part.

What’s this project about?

A quick recap on the project details is to submit photos taken with the Voigtlander Vito BL (if you have a Flickr/Zooomr etc account even better!) and answer four quick questions.

Submissions end Friday 23 May 2008.

Here are a few samples taken with my Voigtlander Vito BL:

After a couple of rolls of film I realised that my light meter doesn’t quite work and here I am going with the tried and tested “Sunny 16″ rule.

Building in York Street, Sydney

And from a B&W film