One Month In

(Originally posted on www.glennlewisphotography.com on March 18, 2015.)

I "launched" www.glennlewisphotography.com roughly five weeks ago.  All that was involved in the launch was (1) creating the website, and (2) telling my friends and family about it, and hoping word-of-mouth and social media savvy (which I'm sadly lacking, for now, but am hoping to improve on this in the future) would carry me forward.  And I suppose it has, to some degree.  Ultimately, I would like this website to provide income for me to settle into photography as a career.  Obviously, this isn't something that happens overnight, and it certainly isn't something that happens when there isn't even a "purchase" button to be found on the site.  I'm aiming to fix this specific problem as soon as July, when I return to Colorado.

So, roughly one month in, where do I stand?  I use Squarespace to run my site, and they provide some metrics.  In the last month, I've had 381 "page views," meaning an average of 17 a day.  This is a pretty small number, and even less encouraging when it is considered that a "page view" is not the same thing as a "visit."  A "visit" counts as a series of page views by an individual.  I've only had 84 "visits" in the last month.  These numbers are what they are, and can be viewed optimistically, or pessimistically.  I'm optimistic they will rise as time goes by.

"Fisheye Forest," originally posted March 4, 2015.

It's also interesting to look at trends, such as specific days that gather a significantly higher number of views than others.  For instance, I had 69 unique page views  on March 4th - a huge number compared to my average of 17.  I posted "Fisheye Forest" on March 4th.  Every time I post a photo, I post it here, onwww.glennlewisphotography.com, as well as on my Facebook page, 500px, Flickr, Smugmug, and Google Plus.

Was there some kind of link between my having posted this particular photo and the increased traffic I experienced this day?  Well, I got 232 views of this photo on 500px, and it reached a peak "pulse" of 88.6, an impressive but not incredible rating based on another metric, this time specific to www.500px.com.  By way of comparison, I've averaged about 143 views per picture I've posted on 500px.

How about Flickr?  "Fisheye Forest" only had 70 views on Flickr.  And Google Plus?  Uh, I'm pretty clueless about what the hell I'm even doing when I get on Google Plus, so I don't really have any idea.  My Facebook page?  It's got 7 "likes," which is among the most of any of my photos.  (Not particularly encouraging)  And I'm not sure that anyone in the world has viewed my Smugmug page, at all.  It's basically a clone of this site, and in the future, I'll have to consider if it is really worth keeping both of them up and running.

So far, this post reads like a bunch of "here are some not-encouraging factoids about my photos," so let me now mention the things that have happened in the last month that ARE encouraging.

"Sanbangsan Sunset," originally posted February 26, 2015.

I have over 21,000 views on 500px.  I think this is good.  There are photographers on 500px who probably get this many views in a day, and perhaps I will, someday, too, but I am happy with this number, given the limited time I've been using the site.

I posted "Sanbangsan Sunset" on February 26, 2015.  It's odd, but for some reason, specific photos really take off on some sites, but not on others.  On 500px, this photo only reached a "pulse" of 48, which is not an impressive number by any account.  However, the same shot was chosen by Flickr to be featured on "Explore," which basically means it was shown on Flickr's front page.  It gathered over 8,500 unique views and over 200 "faves."

My Google Plus profile has over 52,000 views, even though I have no idea what I am doing when I use it.  These numbers are encouraging.

I am ultimately concerned, though, that all these metrics are kind of meaningless.  The sites on which I've been posting my photographs are generally used by other photographers, and artists don't make a living by selling art to fellow artists.  Ultimately, I am going to need to get regular folks to take enough of an interest in my work that they'll be willing to shell out a few hundred bucks to display something I've made on their walls.  I've got some good ideas on how to go about doing this, but none of them are really applicable until I get back to the US.  Until then, I guess I've just gotta keep doing what I'm doing.

To Post or Not to Post...

(Originally posted on www.glennlewisphotography.com on March 10, 2015)

... that is the question.

I've been putting my photographs all over the place in an attempt to "get my name out there" for a couple weeks, now.  I have accounts on Smugmug,500px, Google Plus, Flickr, and of course, Facebook.  My goal, for the next year, and hopefully significantly longer, is to post a single picture, every day, on each of these sites.  There will be days, like when I am traveling, that I won't be able to post.  And that's fine.  I'm posting in this way because if I were to simply post every picture I deem worthy of posting at once - like, now, for instance - what would I talk about and show off to try and garner interest?

Choosing what to post is quite difficult.  I purchased my first DSLR in 2007, and between then and now, my hard drive has accumulated (as of May 10, 2015) 41,594 .jpgs.  I'm not entirely sure what that means as far as pictures I've actually taken in the last 8 years, because I've certainly deleted many more pictures than I've kept.  My hard drive also has 10,467 RAW image files.  These are duplicates of .jpgs, but duplicates that I deemed to be of high enough quality that they may some day be worth editing.  I have 6,778 .tiffs.  These are images that I've created by editing the RAW image files.  All told, my eloquently-named "Pictures" folder contains 69,581 files and 1,813 folders occupying 729 Gigabytes of hard drive space.  Trying to edit and sort through this number of photos in order to choose those that will ultimately be posted on all my sites has been quite an imposing task, but one upon which the last couple years on Jeju have allowed me to make tremendous progress.

And it is here that one difficulty (of many) appears.  How prolific should I be?  Obviously, the more pictures I post, the lower the average quality will become.  I've looked at profile pages of some excellent photographers on 500px who have been members for years and years, and some have only 50 pictures posted.  The fifty pictures some of these photographers have are of unbelievable quality, in some cases better - and I hate to admit this - than the 50 best pictures I've ever taken.  But, in the case of these photographers, they only provide fifty pictures to look at, which I think has a legitimate downside.

Similarly, there are photographers who have thousands of photos posted.  While many of these thousands of photos might be of excellent quality, there are too many 'mediocre' shots for these photographers to stand out.

I don't know where I want to fall on this spectrum.  I tallied the photos I have already posted, as of today (141), and those I intend on posting (390).  531 pictures, total.  That seems like a lot.  And that doesn't take into account the shots I'm hoping to get on my next adventure, which begins in less than two months and will likely be the topic of my next blog post.

I just removed a few pictures a couple hours ago as I thought about this issue.  Here are the four I took down:

Trashed.

Deleted.

Removed.

Taken off the site.

I like all these shots.  I think they're objectively good... but probably not great.  The two images on top - the crows and the bee - were in my South Korea album, which had 59 pictures already - probably more than what is needed for what I feel will ultimately be one of my weaker albums.  More specifically, while the crows are kind of cool because of the black and white contrast, they're just crows.  Everyone's seen a million crows, and no one wants to purchase a print of a crow.  As for the bee, I have a fair number of better bee shots, and a fair number of better flower shots in the same gallery, so it probably isn't worth keeping an inferior duplicate.

The bottom two shots are from my Nepal album, and raise another difficulty.  I'm aware of my subjectivity in deciding what is a 'good' photo, but I'm not sure awareness is enough.  I like these shots, and again, I think they're good.  And while I think viewers might find the picture of the donkeys interesting, it faces the same difficulty as the crows.  There probably aren't many people out there that want to purchase a picture of donkeys.

I'm now realizing, as I type this, that pictures like these will make good filler for this blog, as I move forward with this whole endeavor.  They might not be sale-worthy, but perhaps an accompanying story will make them at least post-worthy.  On the blog, if nowhere else.

Is 531 pictures too many for someone just trying to get into photography professionally?  Maybe.  I guess I'll have to give this some more thought.