If you have a profile on Facebook, be sure to become a fan of The Lens Flare by visiting our new fan page.  Also, while you’re there, be sure to add me as a friend. When you do, please add a note that you found me from TLF.  Otherwise, I may ignore the request.  Feel free to use the fan page to help promote your photography.

Thanks,
Brian

The Nikon D5000 DSLR camera was announced today and is available for preorder by all of the major outlets.  The D5000 is the latest in the line of lower-end Nikon DSLRs and sits between the D60 and the D90 in terms of price and features.  Like the D60, it does not come with a built in autofocus drive, which limits your lens choices to AF-S and AF-I type lenses (ones with autofocus built in). This means that while you’ll save some money up front for the cheaper camera body, you’ll pay for it as you build up your lens collection since these types of lenses tend to cost more.

It’s a 12.3 MP DX-format CMOS DSLR, which means that the focal length is multiplied by 1.5 times. This is typical for lower end models and great for telephoto lenses but not so great for wide angle lenses.  It has movie mode with sound like the D90, which the D60 doesn’t have.  12.3 megapixels ends up capturing an image at 4,288 x 2,848 pixels. A RAW image at 75 pixels per inch before resampling in Photoshop up to 300ppi would thus produce a print up to 57″ x 38″ in size.  Of course, since most prints aren’t made this large, it’s great for post processing cropping and doesn’t require any resampling for an 8×10 or 8×12.

The D5000 is expected to retail at around $730 for the camera body and around $850 for a basic lens.  The D90 tends to run about $1000-$1200 depending on lens options, and the D60 runs $500-$700 depending on lenses purchased.

Personally, if you’re in this price range, I’d purchase the D90 because of the built-in autofocus drive. It’ll give you more options down the road in terms of lenses.  If the choice was between the D60 and the D5000, I’d choose the D5000 because the increase in megapixels and the movie mode.  The difference between $700 and $850 isn’t enough to justify buying the older D60.

In the Dashboard, one of the links is to Manage Images.  This page has a list of your images plus several stats.  In this article, I’ll explain what those stats mean.

Hits:  The number of times your page has been viewed by unique people.  If somebody goes to a page a 2nd time, it is not counted.

7 Days:  The number of times you page has been viewed in the last 7 days. This number is updated once per day.  The percent next to this number is the difference between the last 7 days and the 7 days before that.  This will allow you to see if traffic to your picture is trending up or down.

30 Days: This is exactly the same as 7 days, except that it’s over the last 30 days.

Score: This is a number between 1 and 100.  The higher the number the better.  There are many different factors to determine the score including the total number of views, the total number of recent views (as seen in your 7 and 30 day columns), the number of comments, vote percentile, and several other factors.  The score is on a curve.  The higher the number, the harder it is to reach it; For example, it’s much harder to go from 60 to 70 than it is to go from 50 to 60.  This number is a large factor in how the gallery pages are sorted.  Generally, to improve a score, it requires more activity on that page (more visitors, comments, etc).  One of the best ways to do this is to make sure pictures use descriptive names and enough of a description that somebody searching for that picture will find it.  Sometimes, we change how we are calculating the scores and this often causes large changes.  If you notice that all of a sudden most of your scores are different, this is probably why.

Votes (Percentile):  The first number is how many people have rated your picture.   A person has to be logged in to rate a picture and can only rate each picture once.  The second number is the percentile of all of the ratings versus all of the other ratings on the site.  This is a number between 1 and 100.   For example, if your percentile is 91, that means that it has a better rating than 90% of the other pictures on the site.  Any picture with 0 ratings shows a percentile of 50 (which isn’t technically accurate), but it basically means it’s exactly in the center for other calculations such as the score.

We don’t display the actual results of the ratings because we run everything through several math formulas to ensure that the ratings are accurate and to make it much harder to sabotage the system.  It is important to rate pictures that you both like and dislike.  This helps the math formulas become more accurate.   If you rate everything as a 10, how good is a 10 really?

Thanks.  We hope that this helps you understand the numbers on the Manage Pictures page better.

As a fun spring event, we’ve decided to have a treasure hunt on The Lens Flare.

There are graphics of silver bars carefully placed on 2 different pages on the website, and the first person to find each one will win a free silver membership for a year.  If you already have a membership, it will be extended another 12 months.

To claim your prize, you’ll need to post a comment on this blog post with the address of the page with the graphic. The first person to post the correct page wins. There are 2 prizes total and each person may only win 1 prize.

You will need to be logged into the website in order to see the graphics, which look like a smaller version of this:

The treasure hunt has started and will go until the 2 pages are found.  If they haven’t been found after several days, I’ll start giving clues.

Good luck and have fun!

Brian Broderick

As photographers and artists, we often strive to improve our skills and seek the opinions of others regarding our work. Many art and photography sites set aside a place for this purpose, and The Lens Flare now has a comments and criticism forum for you to use (which is often referred to as C&C).

When using this forum, as well as C&C boards on other sites, it’s best to post a link to your TLF webpage that has the image rather than posting the image directly.  This will bring people into your gallery and they’ll likely visit more pages than just the one you’ve posted.  It’s a great way to increase your gallery’s exposure.  Often, I’ll post 3 links to photos of a similar theme.

Here are the best C&C Boards I’ve found on the web:

The Lens Flare Comments and Criticism Message Board - All Photographers and Artists
DPReview Challenges and Galleries Forum - All Photographers
Photography-on-the.net Canon Photo Sharing Forum - Canon users
Nikonians Image Sharing Forum - Nikon users

By posting for comments and criticism in one or more places, you might see 100-300 visitors view your pictures, and you’ll generally get good feedback as to what people liked and how to improve your photos.

If you know of other great places to solicit feedback on your work, please let us know.