Mark Anderson

Last weekend I made my first trip to Manassas Battlefield in Virginia. This is the site of the first major battle of the Civil War. The First Battle of Bull Run, also known as the First Battle of Manassas (the Confederate and Union forces had different names for each battle.) This first battle was fought on July 21, 1861. A second battle was also fought at this location a year later in August.

Just a few months after the start of the war at Fort Sumter the Union forces started their march toward the Confederate capital of Richmond Virginia. They believed that capturing the capital would put a quick end to the conflict. During the march to the capital the opposing sides had their first battle near a river called Bull Run (shown on right.)

During my planning for this trip I reviewed some of the photos taken by Matthew Brady from the National Archives on Flickr. I'm finding that viewing these photos gives me the opportunity to see what the battlefield looked like during this time period for scouting out important landmarks.

Shown below is a photo of Stone Bridge by Matthew Brady.



The Stone bridge was an important landmark it both of the battles that were fought at Bull Run. Stone Bridge crosses Bull Run to the North of the battlefield. After both battles the Union troops retreated across this bridge. It was destroyed during the Battle of First Manassas on July 21, 1861. A new bridge was built on the site of the old bridge in the same style as the first.

Here is a photo of the bridge from my recent visit.



The first battle of Bull Run started on Matthews Hill as 900 confederate troops attempted to delay over 10,000 Union troops. Shown below is a photo of Matthews Hill as seen from Henry House Hill. This delay gave the Confederates time to bring in support to block this advance.
 


At noon on the first day of fighting the Confederate troops were supported by Col. Thomas J. Jackson's Virginia brigade and his 13 cannons. During this battle Jackson earned his nickname Stonewall Jackson since he was able to stop the Union advance on the battlefield.
 


Overall I'm pleased with many of the images I was able to take at the battlefield and I'm looking forward to  photograph some areas I was not able to visit on this trip, including many of the sites from the second battle of Bull Run. You can view additional photos from this quick day trip on my Manassas Flickr set.

While I was in California visiting family I made a couple of trips out to the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach to photograph the birds and wetlands. I have visited the wetlands several times before when I lived in California. However, this was only my second time visiting with the intent of photographing the birds. The wetlands are very accessible and if you want to learn or practice your flight photography, this is an excellent location. You will also find that you have close access to many of the birds in the area. Here is a shot of a Snowy Egret that was perched on the railing about 10 feet from me.

On this trip I brought my 100-400mm lens on my Canon 7D and I used a monopod for stability. During the morning I was wishing I had my 300mm f2.8 due to the typical cloud cover that is known as June gloom in this area. In the afternoon there was plenty of light. The majority of my best shots were in the late afternoon after 5PM.

There is plenty of wildlife to shoot at the wetlands and I was able to spend some time photographing Black Skimmers. These birds are interesting since they will fly low to the the water skimming their beak on the surface searching for food.

I was also able to get a nice closeup flight shot as one of the Black Skimmers flew by me on the boardwalk. This is one my favorite shots from the day.

Shown below is a video of the Snowy Egret agitating the water to find food.



Here is a shot of a Great Egret waiting near the waters edge hunting for fish.

If you are visiting or live near the wetlands, I highly recommend this location.You can view more of my photos and videos on my Bolsa Chica wetlands set on Flickr.

Earlier this month I drove up to Wilmington Delaware to attend a photowalk and Civil War reenactment train ride. For this trip I brought my Infrared converted camera and my Canon 5D which shoots standard color images. The photowalk and train ride started at the Wilmington & Western train station. At this location they run several historic diesel and steam locomotives. On this day we rode #98 which is a 1909 American Standard steam locomotive.



One of the reasons why I drove over 2 hours to Delaware was to photograph Civil War reenactors that were going to be riding the train for a skirmish between the Union and Confederate troops. The train arrived at the station and the Union troops disembarked and served as guards for the train and the station.

The reenactors never broke character during the entire train ride and there were several civilian reenactors at the train station as well.

Once everyone was boarded on the train it headed north up the Red Clay valley through some nice countryside and along the Red Clay Creek. The train ride was about 90 minutes and I recommend paying the extra dollar to sit in the open air car.

As we reached the end of the rail line the Confederate troops fired on the train from the cover of the trees and the Union troops left the train to engage in battle.



After the battle the Confederate troops were victorious and they boarded the train for the return trip back to the station.


It was an enjoyable day and I would like to visit the railroad again in the future. I have posted more photos from that day on Flickr in my Wilmington & Western set.

As we approach the Summer months it seems like the number of photowalks on the schedule increases dramatically. It has been over a year since I have attended my last photowalk and I'm looking forward to the following walks that are scheduled near my area.

The first one I'm excited about is the Wilmington & Western Railroad walk in Wilmington Delaware. This walk will be near an historic steam railroad station. There will be plenty of opportunities to photograph the historic rail line and trains. There is also the option to board the train with Civil War renactors as they head off to a Civil War skirmish at the end of the rail line. I have already bought my ticket for the train ride and I'm planning on bringing my infrared camera for my Civil War IR project. This walk will be held on Saturday June 12th.

The next walk I have on my schedule is the 3rd annual World Wide Photowalk that was created by Scott Kelby. I have been to the first two and I just registered again to attend Jeff Revell's walk in Georgetown in Washington DC. This walk is scheduled for July 24th. There will be walks all over the world and if you have never been on a photowalk, this is a great chance to join one in your local area. Last year they had over 900 different locations hosting a photowalk.

One walk I was planning on going to but now can't is Andy's New Oxford walk next weekend on Saturday June 5th in Pennsylvania. I have been on several of Andy's walks in the past and he always has a great route planned.

It looks like we are off to a great start this year and it will be nice to meet up with many of my local photographer friends.

One of the perks of being part of the Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) photoclub is that we are sometimes given special access to the animals. A couple of weekends ago we were able to photograph the new Andean bear cubs as they get their first chances to explore the outside yard. Yesterday the bear cubs were given names, Chaska, pronounced Chas'-kuh, for the female and Bernardo for the male cub.

Here is a selection of photos from that weekend.







The lighting for that day was very bright and with dark bears, the contrast range was hard to photograph. I'm looking forward to my next trip to the zoo so I can get some photos in better lighting conditions. The bears will be viewable by the general public on May 22nd.

I recently started to shoot some subjects with the intent of experimenting with various post processing techniques for the final output. I do all of my image post processing in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and have been experimenting with various saturation, contrast, and clarity settings. When you are working in the develop module you are shown the following options for processing a photo (on right.)

There are many sources on the net that go into great detail about how to use the develop module in Lightroom. Jon McCormak wrote a good overview article on the basic options each slider gives you in the develop module. I have listed additional resources at the bottom of this post.

My plan was to take various plant and foliage photos to experiment with different techniques on post processing.

In the following photos I didn't change the color saturation. I pumped up the blacks above normal and went with a negative 100 on the clarity slider. I also increased the overall contrast of the image.

One thing to keep in mind is that the clarity slider works on the contrast of the mid-tones of your image. The contrast slider works on the contrast range for the entire image. So with these settings I was effectively reducing the contrast of the image in the mid-tones via the clarity slider. I then increased the overall contrast with the contrast slider. This effect essentially increases the contrast in the shadows and highlights and leaves the mid-tones soft. When I pump up the saturation of the blacks I'm also increasing the contrast levels of the dark parts of the image. You can see this effect in the two images below.


For the next set of images I pumped up the blacks again to increase the shadow contrast. I also increased the vibrance which adds more saturation to the non-predominant colors in the scene. Finally I went with a 100% positive on the clarity slider. This combined effect gives the images a look of punch and sharpness.

This past weekend I made a trip out to the National Zoo to photograph some new baby animals. I can't post some of those photos until sometime next week. While I was there I photographed some of the other animals at the zoo. Here is a selection of some of my shots. These were all shot with my Canon 500mm f4 lens.

My first stop was to the outside yard of the Western Lowland Gorillas. This area has been under construction for the past couple of weeks and this was the first time they were back out in the yard.

Here is Kibibi riding on her mothers back. She is about 16 months old now.

Last week I ran a test to measure my sphere of influence with this website. I was also testing a new web analytics package called Woopra. A free trial can be found at woopra.com. In my last post I went into a little bit of detail about Woopra and the benefits of using an application like this. Trey Ratcliff from StuckinCustoms.com did a nice review of the Woopra service and posted an example of how the service works for a site that actually gets some traffic.



When I started my test I was under the assumption that my sphere of influence was about 10 dedicated followers and a sphere of marginal interest up to 100.

I had four tasks setup for my test. One write an article, two measure the results for a day, three promote the post via twitter, and four report the over all results.

Well after writing the article I had one hit to the page for the first day (page number 4 listed below.)

 

The next day I ran a small mention on Twitter (which is feed onto Facebook as well.) After that mention I gained 4 more hits to the page and all of them came from Facebook (NetworkedBlogs is a Facebook app.)
 


All total I received 6 hits to the page in the days since I published the article. I didn't reach my core of 10 people I estimated, but with numbers this small a margin of error can be huge. It also probably didn't help that the article was not that interesting to begin with unless you are a web analytics person.

After running this test I was able to determine that essentially my estimates for dedicated followers was somewhat accurate. However, I'm now thinking my sphere of marginal interest is much lower. In a nutshell I have very little traffic to this website. I knew that already since I never promote this website. One interesting item I found is that when I take into account all of my traffic for the various images I post in the MyDrive project. I'm able to reach more people. When it comes to images I consistently get about 20-30 page views for new images within the first couple of days of posting. When I post articles it is much lower. This test has confirmed a couple of key facts. I have a follower base as close to zero as you can be. I can either keep things the same and talk to my very small circle of friends, or can I increase this base to a list of 100 dedicated fans?

At work and with my various clients I tell them how to increase their traffic using all the standard techniques of engagement and promotion. I have also done this in the past with other website I have started or managed. Here is one example, I started www.altenergystocks.com and took the traffic from 0 to 10,000 page views a month in about about a year. I ended up selling that site to the current owners. Can I do the same with this website? Since I know I'm currently talking to myself here, I guess it is more of a question to myself. It would be an excellent case study that I can use and point to for the future. So here begins my journey to gain my 100 dedicated true fans.

Last night after my monthly photoclub meeting I was driving home listening to a recent episode of This Week in Photography. In that episode Frederick had an interview with the CEO of Woopra, John Pozadzides aka John P. Woopra is a web analytics company that offers a tool to help webmasters track and visualize their website traffic and statistics. I was a beta tester of their software about a year ago and found that the tool was great for tracking your website statistics. It is superior in many ways compared to tools like Google Analytics. I especially like the real time nature of the tool where you can view the live hits to the website as they happen However, when they left the beta stage they only offered a paid version of the service. At that time I was unemployed so I never signed up for the service.

In the interview last night I learned that they have since moved to a freemium model and they now offer a free version of the tool. So this morning I re-enabled the tracking code again and I'm giving this tool another test drive.

I have always treated this website and blog as a testing ground and have installed and tried various software plugins and packages over the years to test the effectiveness of the tools for eventual use for client websites. I have not really put much effort into generating traffic for my own website so I may have some difficulty giving this new web analytics tool a proper test drive. Since I'm in a testing mode with the tool I figured I would try a little experiment to measure my sphere of influence on this website.

There is an internet meme that has become popularized by Keven Kelly called 1000 True Fans. A summary from his website states that:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Ctein is a photographer that I follow and has taken this same idea and stated he only needs 100 fans to continue his photographic work full-time.

If I take the concept of fans and apply it to my own work I estimate I currently have about 10 fans. I don't think all 10 would be willing to buy my work, but I know that they are consistently interested in what I say and produce photographically.

If I look at the comments and mentions I receive on Facebook, Flickr, and this website I would estimate that I'm at least on the radar screen of interest for about 50 additional people. I may even go as high to estimate my total sphere of vague interest is 100 people. Am I right?

As I said, I never really tried to market or increase my sphere of influence, so any influence or interest I  currently have is based on doing the bare minimum. 

So with this test I want to check if my assumptions are correct. Do I really have a sphere of influence of less than 100 people or is it more (could it be less?) This also brings me back to the install of the Woopra software. With this post I will gauge what my true sphere of influence is and hopefully the analytics tool can help to provide that information.

With this test I'm going to do the following:

1. Write this post (which is done)
2. Check the traffic to the post for a day with no additional promotions. This post will automatically feed into my RSS feed (which has about 15 subscribers) and will automatically feed into Facebook (with 171 friends.)
3. Tomorrow I will post a link to this article in Twitter to my 360 followers.
4. I will then analyze the data and post a follow-up article letting you know how it goes. I will also show how I used Woopra (and other tools) to track my sphere of influence.
   

So flashing back to my old DJ days... with a mic check, testing 123, is this thing on?

I'm starting off my podcast reviews with one of my favorite podcasts on photography. The LensWork podcast is produced by Brooks Jensen from LensWork magazine.

The premise of LensWork and the podcast is that photography is more than just another way to feed your gadget addiction. Photography can be a way of life. Brooks is concentrated on sharing and exploring the aspects of leading a creative life and he shares this through his media.

Here is a statement from his website:

Beyond cameras and equipment, beyond film and chemistry, beyond pixels and technology lie the mysteries of the creative life shared by those who strive to communicate and express themselves clearly - fine art photographers, commercial photographers, amateurs and professionals.

These podcasts are a mix of storytelling, philosophy, and an exploration of the creative life. They are usually about 3-5 minutes in length and Brooks shares his years of knowledge on various aspects of being a creative professional and artist.

A recent podcast episode titled Controlled Accidents describes his thoughts and the philosophy of Allan Watts in his book Zen and the Art of the Controlled Accident and how it affects his artwork. The art of seeing something beautiful out of the "random slop" that is out there to photograph. Making controlled accidents give us the ability to let go of our control and to open our mind. This is when your artwork comes alive.

In another recent podcast titled Knowing the Thing, Brooks gives you the importance of knowing a subject rather than being able to classify the subject. True knowledge is found when you go beyond being able to classify a thing. It is when you understand and know the behavior of a thing. This can be applied to your art making tools but also to your subjects. When you know a thing you can take that intimate knowledge and create something more compelling and be able to share a unique vision and mastery of a thing.

There are over 600 episodes on his website and I have listened to all of them, and many of them multiple times to try to squeeze as much knowledge as I can out of his wisdom. If I could only subscribe to one podcast on photography I would make this one at the top of my list.

You can find out more details on his Website and you can subscribe to the podcast via the following iTunes Link.