It's been a while again

The understatement of the year or maybe years, I'm not even sure how long it's been. Well I've switched things up years since getting a job in a factory my original plan was to have them pay for my bachelor's degree only to find out that they wouldn't pat for Graphic Design. What the will pay for is business so at the moment I'm going  to school for business marketing I figured I could help myself at the same time if I ever get my own business up and running. I'm in Brazil at the moment for Christmas and New Year's classes start on the 8th. Cheers

Maybe I'll start this new tradition at the end of my post I'll put a link to an article I like or think is useful today's will be about UX design.... I guess I need to read up on this stuff!😎

http://designrfix.com/web-design/ux-design-improve-sites-conversion-rate

It's been awhile

Like the title says its been a while since I've posted anything to my blog. There are a few reasons for one my in-laws visited from Brazil for about 3 weeks from late April to mid May, and the second reason would be I started going back to school on the 19th of May. I did manage to get some photos taken at a little car show, which I posted a few of the shots to my Flickr account. If you haven't checked it out yet you can see it here Flickr be sure to fave a few and if you have a Flickr account please feel free to follow me, I try to upload a variety of pictures and am steadily building up a nice collection of shots. So hopefully I'll have more time and some more interesting news to report on, but for now I that's all I got. Thanks for reading.

Google+ Oddities Part 2

Oddities Part 2

I just wanted to add one more thing to my earlier post about the strange ways of Google+. One of the most annoying things about G+ has got to be the way they require you to post. I understand their theory and principal of sharing certain things with certain circles and communities. However what I don't agree with is that if I want to share with multiple communities I can't and on top of that when I go through the process of sharing with multiple communities it shows up every time in my feed. For example if I share a photo with 10 different groups the same photo will show up 10 times in a row in my feed. This is just not a problem for me that is annoying on my own feed, but also annoys me when I look at someone else's profile and have to scroll and scroll just to get to their next post, because G+ finds it necessary to show me that they shared the same pic with 10 different communities. 

So my advice for G+ is.... STOP IT!! 

I really don't have much time to get into the next subject on my hit list, which would be about the way G+ handles pictures, I'll save that for part 3.

Google+ and its oddities

Google+ and its Oddities 

Okay first of all I'll just say that I'm not going to go too deep into this, since it's 11:22 pm and I don't plan on being up for much longer. With that being said let me start with Google+'s number of views thingy (that's the scientific name :) ) I only have 112 or 113  followers on G+ but it says that I now have over 281,000 views, Wow! you'd think if this were true I'd have more followers. Instead it makes me feel like a zoo animal (if it's true, and I think not) people just come by and look at you and then keep walking day after day. Hell if 10% would have added me I'd be doing pretty good on the old internet. 

That takes me to my next point, I don't understand how some people have such a large amount of followers. There are a few types of these people, 1. People who just post random things they find on the net (looks like Tumblr users to me) 2. They have a lot of followers and yet haven't posted anything in over a year or more, or they've posted like 10 things over 2-3 years. Like I said I'm not going deep into this right now, but I may come back and edit this post to add more, but for now that is enough on the followers thingy (again its scientific)

One more thing before I go, another funny thing about Google+ is that Photographers are some of the most popular people. Now that is just awesome since I love photography and design in general. Well just a few things I felt like saying today, and to the few who read this I say thank you! 

A nice little article about SEO

Hello everyone, today I just want to share this article I came across on Zite, here that gives some tips about what photographers should do to increase their visibility on the web. To be a little more specific to help your site show up higher in the search results on Google. One of the tips involves linking, which I have done here, although they will not be linking to my blog( because I have the exact problem they talk about, and that is not being known, I'm trying to work on that) but that's okay hopefully someone will read this blog, and in turn link back to my blog ( hint hint) anyways give it a read, I really think it has some useful pointers and is not too awful long of a read.

No Bueno

No Bueno

Well I put out some flyers, around town haven't received one nibble yet. I am going to design a new one and try again, but time is running out on my idea of freelancing instead of getting a part time job. School starts on May 19th so after that it will be too difficult to keep up my efforts. I paid for an on Facebook for my side company Photo Saver (check it out and like my page please) which got me a lot of paid views but not one single person contacted me about it. I think that in the case of that page I need to educate people a little more on the services I provide. So I will continue to try, because I will never give up, however there is some good news, the weather here is finally starting to improve, which has given my motivation a boost.

The Next Challenge

Well well well, the 30 day challenge has ended now it's time for a new one. Although this challenge will not have an actual updates, unless of course I land a job. So I just gave away my challenge which is to get my first design job. I've printed out a few flyers just to test how well they work, if I don't get any response from this first small batch, I will redesign the flyer and run another test until I nail the one that gets the most attention. I have ordered business cards from Vista Print ( I know that's kind of lame but I'm broke) the really bad thing is my wife was convinced I didn't need a backside to my cards. Okay she doesn't get it! (I'm a designer with a janky business card) But what am I going to do it is her money that I'm buying these things with. I will say this, as soon as I do get a few paying jobs, I will order some proper business cards!

That's all I have for now its not much I realize that, but to the few people who may read this, I thank you! Stick in there with me, and one day I will have some better news, I'd love to share my experience's and projects, I just have to figure out how to get the ball rolling.

B&W Photo Challenge Day #30 - Finally I Need a Drink

I Need A Drink

So this is it #30 in the 30 day black and white photo challenge, it only took me about 2 months to complete ( thank you Mother Nature!) I took this photo with my cellphone, and I thought this would be a good ending photo for this little experiment. I have learned somethings, mainly that I am not a dog and I need some color in my life! I do love love B&W photos but I know that I would go crazy if it was the only pictures I could take (good thing it's 2014) I struggled to complete this task and I didn't get to use all the cameras I planned on using, although I did post pictures that were taken by some of my old cameras, so I guess it evened its self out in the end. Anyways I don't know what I'm going to next but I do know that it will be something in color! 

B&W Photo Challenge Day #28 - 2 Bones

2 Bones

These two dolls were at my friends wedding, and I thought they were pretty cool so I took a pic of them. While searching for a pic to use for this challenge I thought " Bones are white, and the groom has on a black suit, that should work!" 

B&W Photo Challenge Day #27 - Hot Wheels

Hot Wheels

This photo was taken at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway a few years ago using My Sony DSC-HX1.

There is not a whole lot that I can say about this picture except that life sized Hot Wheels are pretty awesome! 

B&W Photo Challenge Day#25 - Tornado Damage 1

Tornado Damage

Back on November 17, 2013 an F2 tornado ripped through my city here is a picture of one of the buildings that got damaged. I'll post a link here for a little more info on the damage if you're interested.

Pretty crazy stuff, but one of the most amazing things is that nobody died, so that is always a good thing. I shot this photo a few days ago with my D5100. My next photo will be of another business that was damaged and now they are rebuilding.

 

 

B&W Photo Challenge Day #22 - Coming Home From Chicago 2008

Coming Home

This is the joy of living in the Mid-West, after driving really slow for over an hour and almost crashing, from listening to Eli Manning's ESCAPE in the Superbowl. I finally got a chance to stop and clean off my window and wipers. My wife took this photo, and I think the blur is a nice touch, reminds me of a book cover. This is another photo taken with the HP PhotoSmart Mz-60 (I never planned on having so many photos from this camera, but that's just how it has worked out) 

B&W Photo Challenge Day #21 - Jerome Christian Church

Jerome Christian Church

A photo taken at my local county fair, back in 2009. shot was taken with my old camera (HP PhotoSmart Mz60.)  This is not a real church just a mock up of one that is a near by town named Jerome. Now the little town of Jerome is more famous for its haunted graveyard, than its church but hey you can't invite ghosts to the fair. This is probably the first time the town (or as I call it a village) has been talked about on the internet. As far as the the graveyard being haunted, I'm not sure but I have been there at night and it is very creepy. You should know that this town is in Indiana if you have read anything about me on this blog, so if you want to look it up and see if you can find out more information, just Google "Jerome Indiana Haunted" and you'll get the scoop. Anyways here's the pic of the little fake church.

Tumblr?

Tumblr?

Tumblr, stylized in its logo as tumblr., is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private.^[4][5] Much of the website's features are accessed from the "dashboard" interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.

As of February 7, 2014, Tumblr hosts over 170.2 million blogs.^[2] The company's headquarters is in New York City.

I got this definition from Wikipedia  

What the hell is microblogging?

Maybe I'm out of the loop?

Maybe I'm not that cool?

So I am not on Tumblr, but I have been looking at a lot of posts on there thanks to the app Zite. Don't get me wrong I like it and think that there are a lot of cool things on there and maybe it's just the posts I've been seeing but it seems like it should not be considered a blog site. I mean it might as well be Pinterest, because all I see is a bunch of pictures that are by other people and they re-blog them from other users, really no original content, and definitely no writing. When you "like" something they call it notes which is kind of funny to me. And let me just say there are a lot of strange people on there that like a lot of strange things; don't get me wrong I like some of of it because I'm a little strange too, but we all are. I would probably join if I thought I had time, it just gets too overwhelming to try to keep up multiple Blogs and sites. I have a hard enough time keeping up with this, backing up pictures between Google drive, Sky Drive (One Drive), Pinterest, Facebook, Deviant Art, Flickr, as well as some others. That is about all I have to say about this for now, although I won't rule out that I won't join someday and if I do I'll let you know.    

Take on more? That is the question?

Maybe

Maybe not