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

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.

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 #24 - Old Bike

Old Bike

Wow I finally got a new picture! Since I've had to resort to using old pictures, that I had on my computer, and this was never the plan. So this picture I took outside of Wal-Mart using my Galaxy Nexus. I really wish I had a better camera and a better background to deal with but hey it is what it is, and at least it's new.

B&W Photo Challenge Day #23 - Snake Bite

Snake Bite

This photo was taken at the Cincinnati Zoo, the camouflage of this snake was pretty wild in color, but I think it's even more scary in black and white. I hope to never run into this snake, I hope I run it over with a car, because I know I wouldn't see it. And if I did see it near me,I would probably die! Not from the bite but probably from a heart attack! Shot with my Sony, gradient map, and sharpening done in Photoshop.

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

B&W Photo Challenge Day #19 - Scurvy

Scurvy

Yes I know that this is a very strange title for a post but you'll see why when you look at the picture. This is a guy I worked with, back when I was a taxi driver, he chose this as his nickname for a motorcycle club. I won't tell you his name but his last named kind of resembled Scurvy, and I think the fact that he is missing teeth may have helped too! I'm not making fun of the guy I just think it's funny, he's actually a cool dude, and hey I think this picture is pretty neat too. As far as what I did to this picture I used a Gradient Map in Photoshop this is my new preferred method of making colored images into B&W, since I can get a more pure black and white image instead of that kind of greyish looking crap that I usually end up with. Shot this about 4 years ago, with my Sony DSC-HX-1.

B&W Challenge Day # 14 - Open Doors

Open Doors

This photo I took at last years Oktoberfest here in my city. The photo was taken with my trusty Sony, and then I tuned it up using Photomatix Pro, which usually I like to use for creating HDR photos, but in this instance I used it to make this photo into a B&W image. The photo has seen a pretty good response on my Flickr account as far as page views go it is one of more more popular ones. Speaking of my Flickr account I have just recently joined so I do not have a lot of photos on there yet but I will be posting a little something on here soon about that. Anyways back to this picture...... here it is!

B&W Challenge Day #13- Two Ugly Birds

2 Ugly Birds

This was a shot I took at the Indianapolis Zoo back in 2012, shot with my Sony DSC- HX1. Originally shot in color, I converted it in Photoshop to B&W and did some tweaking.

B&W Photo Challenge Day #6- Wet Fit

Wet Fit

This is a picture of my car after being in the snow (because it's snowing again!!!) her name is Gloria and she is a 2009 Honda Fit with a mere 37K miles on it, and I love her, so I figured she deserved a little action in my challenge. I took this photo with my 

Nikon D5100 18mm , ISO 800, 1/4 sec. shutter speed, no flash.

I used a little clip light to the right with a weak 60 watt bulb, I had it clipped to my weed whacker ;) !!

I noticed it did blow out the image a little in the headlight, but it was cold and the set up was shaky. All in all though I think it came out pretty good ( and now I know what I can do different, I will try again when the weather is better. I post processed this photo 1st in Camera Raw (because I shot it in raw) some adjustments I made were to the contrast, blacks, sharpening, and a few more tweaks. I then opened it up in Photoshop and basically did some more minor adjustments, and oh yeah I desaturated  it because I originally shot this in full color. Well enough of the ramblings, but before I go I would like to send a shout out to my few foreign visitors ( that I hope to gain more of) thanks for visiting people of Germany, Finland, France, and the Ukraine.

Gloria all Wet!

B&W Photo Challenge Day #5 Iphone 5s

Doctor Sleep

Today's picture was taken with my wife's Iphone 5s, which has a 8 Megapixel camera. I switched the shooting mode to Noir to take this picture of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep book while in Target ( and yes my wife was shopping again, seems like I theme) I didn't make any adjustments to the photo at all and I'd have to say that it came out pretty well. For those of you who don't know Doctor Sleep is the sequel to The Shining, and not that they need a plug (paper or author) here is a more thorough review of the book by the New York Times  I myself haven't had a chance to read this book yet (because lets be honest, who has time to read novels?) but it sounds really good, I just hope I get to read it before they make it into a movie. Tomorrow who knows what the day will bring.

About the Name refocus

Hello, since I said I would explain more about the name of my little freelance business, here it goes. First of all I didn't capitalize the (r), well mainly because I didn't want to, but also as style choice ( I just think it looks better.) The 2nd thing behind the name is a little more deep ( meaning lengthy ) some of it personal some of it slogan driven.
I had been driving a taxi for 7 years, until the company closed. This was the first time I had to "refocus" what I wanted to do with my life. So I decided to take advantage of my unemployment by going to college. So then I graduated not too long ago, but unfortunately I have found out that most employers want a bachelor's degree. Well guess what time it became??? Yep you guessed it time to refocus! So I decided to become a freelancer. Now as far as the Slogan side of it, I thought of all kinds of tag lines like " Time to get your business back in focus" " refocus on what matters to you" or just "get focused" like I said there are a lot of possibilities with the name. Now all I have to do is get refocused on this freelancing thing and I'll be all right. Oh yeah if you need any help getting your businesses refocused, let me know and we can help each other.

Hello everyone, my name is Roger Williams I am 34 years old and live in Kokomo Indiana.  I just started this blog to jump start my plans of being a  freelance Graphic Designer. Since I graduated earlier this year with an associates degree in Visual Communications, I have been unable to find a job in my desired area. Since Graphic Design is what I really want to do and I can not afford to wait around any longer or go back to school for 2 more years, I have decided to start my own freelance Graphic Design business which I have decided to call refocus (and yes the R is not capitalized on purpose.)I will explain more later about the name but that will be another time. I am currently in the beginning stages of the business and I am still learning the ends and outs of what I should or shouldn't be doing. So for right now I really don't have much to report on, I really just wanted to write a post to let people know what I'm about.

I have created a few things that you may want to check out; the first is the community I created for creative/designer type people around where I live, give it a look and join if you like it.
Kokomo Designers Club   

The other Link I would like to share is my own portfolio. 
My portfolio

And now for a little unveiling of the logo......