RRD Photo Blog is now One Year-Old!

In what hasn't seemed like a whole year, this humble little blog is now quite a ways from its first post back on 22 January, 2007!

Most Popular Articles of the First Year
Here is a list of the four most popular articles of the first year of this blog.

How to: Add a Sync Port to a Canon 580EX Flash
Thanks in part to the Strobist Revolution, my post on modding a Canon 580 EX flash was a huge hit! A big thanks goes to Lon from FlashZebra who provided the insight and part required for the project; it's been a big year for him as well - he has grown a pretty active business with FlashZebra that is full of happy customers. Canon has since released a 580EX II that provides a sync port, but given how expensive it is there are a lot of folks interested in modding their rev-1 580's.

Split Toning in Lightroom and Camera RAW
With the explosively popular Lightroom being on nearly everyone's mind, it's no surprise that this is one of the most popular articles. I really enjoy the split toning capabilities of LR, but recently I've found that I'm an even bigger fan of adding the effect via a solid color layer set to Soft Light blending in Photoshop CS3. Each technique has its place, but the Soft Light version has a subtlety that the Lightroom/ACR split tones can't quite match.

Recommended Photography Podcasts
Lists are always popular blog topics & my list of photography podcasts was no exception. This post comes in at number three and still gathers several hits per day. It's in need of an update/revisit to reflect my current listening habits... stay tuned!

Digital Multiple Exposure Photography
Posted way back in March of last year, this was one of the first "technique" articles that I ventured into. It was fairly well received search & hit wise, though the blog was so new at the time I wonder if it got the exposure it deserved (no pun intended). Take a look and post a link to your digital multi-exposure results!



Statistics and Growth
There have been almost 200 posts so far to the blog... That's a lot of writing! The most popular post categories have been (taken straight from the Label Cloud on the left):

cincinnati

photographs

photoshop

events

ramblings

lightroom

gear

tutorial

Hm - that's a lot of Cincinnati! Is this a Cincinnati blog? Yes, but it's a general Photography Blog first and foremost. I make a point of balancing out the articles of regional interest with those that are more general & I think the formula works so far.

The cloud is a bit misleading in this regard since anything that I may have photographed in the area will get this label applied. Still, drop me a line if you think things are starting to trend a little too local & I'll course correct from there.

RRS Feed Subscribers
The best way to follow this (or any) blog is by Subscribing to the RSS Feed. This allows you to receive the new posts at your convenience in your RSS Reader and means that you don't need to visit every blog you like every single day just to see if there has been an update. If it weren't for RSS Feeds & Readers, blogs would most certainly not be as popular as they are today.

The image above shows the growth trend in our RSS Readership. Starting with zero, there have been a peek of 460 subscribers to the feed & it is trending up! The major catalyst in November was a link from Brian Auer of the Epic Edits Blog in his post on Blogs He Reads (thanks, Brian!). Brian started his blog around the same time I did and he's had some amazing success with it so far. I'm looking forward to strengthening my inter-blogger relationships in 2008, so stay tuned for some guest posting and other happenings!

Thanks!!

Thank you to everyone who has been following along so far! Ask any blogger and they'll tell you: this is hard work, but it's worth it. I'm looking forward to what the next year of Photography and Blogging brings and I hope you'll all stay tuned.