Thanks,
Brian

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.

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.

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

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.

With that in mind, I thought these images represent some cool places to visit or sights to see.

Tugboat on Fraser River at Evening
River Great Ouse, Bedford
Taby Wall along Magnolia Avenue, St Augustine, Florida
Shaker architecture
Alameda Spite House
Waterfalls
Sunset Eagle

I hope you enjoy these pictures.  I plan to post more like this regularly.

Here’s to the next million visits!

Brian

Let’s say you’re uploading a picture of a waterfall.  There are millions of pages about waterfalls on the Internet, and you’re competing with all of those pages when somebody does a search for “Waterfall”. If you include the location of your waterfall, such as the Lower Mesa Falls in Southern Idaho, you’re competing with far fewer pages overall for that specific one.  Then, if somebody searches for things like “waterfalls in Idaho” or by that specific name, you’re more likely to be one of the top results.

It doesn’t take much traffic to boost your image’s score, which in turn pushes your picture to the top of TLF’s category pages.  This makes your picture even more visible, which increases the number of people that’ll potentially view it, which improves the score, and so on.

Thanks,
Brian

The first version was launched at the beginning of 2009 and is geared towards working professionals that wish to expand their reach and marketing efforts. If you’re a self-employed, freelance, or small business professional, you will benefit greatly from this website because it gives you a place to blog about your talents, products, and services. You are allowed to link back to your own website which gives you a boost in search engine rankings and brings people directly to your site. So far, we have accountants, lawyers, business owners, marketers, real estate agents, and photographers using the site.

We’d like to extend an invitation to you to take a look at http://www.prospotlight.com

ProSPOTLIGHT is a great place to gain additional exposure to your photographic talents especially if you are trying to start or build a photography business. We know as much as anybody that it’s expensive to market yourself either online or offline, and therefore a place like ProSPOTLIGHT.com will greatly aide in your efforts because it’s currently 100% free to use.

ProSPOTLIGHT is also being used by job-seekers as a homepage to send potential employers to for more information about their talents. A well written spotlight could be the tipping point that convinces an employer that you’re the right person for the job. You also have the ability to link out to many of the other sites that you use such as your Facebook account, your Monster resume, your LinkedIn profile, etc.

To give you an example of what can be done, I’ve created a spotlight for my nature photography at http://www.prospotlight.com/pro/naturephotography - I intend to use this to show off my best nature and wildlife images.

We’ve built this system so that it can serve the needs of many different communities including The Lens Flare. The system is written in a different language than what The Lens Flare was, so everything has to be rewritten to work; therefore, it will take a few months to write the image gallery code and the other features that you love on TLF. Once this is done, TLF will be ‘upgraded’ to use the new code along with a fresh design that will aim at making things less cluttered.

We hope you like the new site, and we welcome any feedback that you might have. Feel free to reply here, email me at brian at thelensflare dot com, or send me a message using ProSPOTLIGHT’s messaging system.

Thanks,
Brian Broderick

PS The directory system is ordered by ‘points’, which you earn by being active on the site. For example, if you write a blog post, you will earn points. Those with the most points show up first for their country, state/region, city, and occupation. Those at or near the top will receive more traffic, leads, and sales than those at the bottom simply because people choose the first options more often.

Once you sign up, be sure to direct people to your spotlight. Any person that visits one of your pages first and then registers an account will be flagged as your referral. You will earn bonus points for any points your referral earns, which will help you move higher up on the directory pages.