Over the weekend I achieved one of those crazy vanity metrics that I feel great about even though it has little measurable impact. My photo blog on Flickr surpassed one million total views.
It feels great and exciting, kind of a cool thing to happen. A million is a nice number to roll around in your head, especially when you consider that I bought my first DSLR — a Nikon D60 — six years ago.
You’ll notice two distinct bumps in the above chart, one from my shots at SXSW and last week’s bump from Social Media Marketing World (#smmw14). These two events were nice photo bombs that generated a ton of traffic. You can read my coverage of #smmw14 here on the Vocus blog, but I do want to excerpt one section:
Ekaterina Walter, co-author of The Power of Visual Storytelling, offered a different statistic, which was that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text by the brain. She said, “Content with compelling visual content receives 94 percent more total views.”
I have to agree. I don’t think I could have gotten a surge of new followers, a few new business opportunities, and general momentum from these shows without photographs.
San Diego at night
But I digress. More than anything, hitting a million views makes me feel like I really am a half decent photographer.
There have been a couple of other recent affirmations, too. Over the past two weeks I was asked to file a story on CNN’s iReport platform based on my baseball pics over the years, and to present a photographers view of DC at a networking event in Baltimore, by Dee O’Horan.
My friends Cheryl Vosburg and Mike Smith’s wedding.
So I took the amateur off my photographer description on Twitter. I can safely say that I am a real photographer now.
I still have more to learn, starting with editing in Aperture and Photoshop, as well as maximizing the potential of my Nikon D7100. When I reach that next level, I hope to move to HD full frame shots with a Nikon D800E.
Speaking of photography, if you are in DC on April 9, please join me and social media all star Ann Tran for a beautiful early morning Cherry Blossom photowalk at the Tidal Basin. We will be meeting up at 7 am, and will have an informal coffee and breakfast meetup afterwards.
Thank you to everyone of you who has looked at and/or shared one of my photos. I really appreciate it.
On to the next photo!