Dusting off the password...a bit of celebrating today

I suppose tis quite the accomplishment to do that in 8 years with just ART and "blogging on the fly..." stuff as opposed to porn.  I don't kid myself, a friends ex specializes in raunch porn his trying to pass off as vintage and he does a million in 3 months.  But I took the higher road and did it my way, the way I always do.  True to myself.  True to those that follow me, never raunch for sake of views.

I'm still blogging everywhere, but here.  I do shoot often, love my newish EOS 60D from Canon, it does some pretty amazing stuff, but its still just a tool that enables me to create images.  I know when I resort for techniques sake things suffer.  In the end its about stunning images, not how you got there.

Recently we took the fam down behind the Orange Curtain for a day of whale watching.   Something you just can't do here in the SGV.  By far my favorite tour company for that is Dana Wharf Sport Fishing and Whale Watching in Dana Point.  Their crew works well with other boats to  ensure you see a whale, or two, or dolphins to make your trip memorable.  Often they have a Marine Biologist on board and they give you a ton if information and trivia on what you are seeing to make the trip even more fun.  Worth the trip.  Been with them twice now and both times were pretty amazing.

To follow my daily adventures, or my adventures with commercial stuff and CARS follow me on flickr. 

500,000+ flickr views

And I did it all without porn!

Well no girly porn at least.  Lots of car porn as that is mostly what I have shot of late.  Los Angeles Auto Show press days (2 days worth), 2015 Mustang Reveal and a Ford Open House all made for lots of photo ops with cars and it drove the traffic to me.

2013 L.A. Auto Show
2015 Mustang Reveal
Ford Open House

Of course in all of that there was a lot of  blogging in all of that, mostly on SoCalAutoBlog and on blogging.la.  Speaking of blogging.la, I broke 1000 posts a short while back.  Not sure where I am right now but it was an important goal for me and I did it.

In the end I do a lot of fun and more creative stuff, but not always with my art in mind.  Life gets in the way of passions and there are only so many hours in a day.  Maybe 2014 I should resolve to spend more time on art than commercial and photojournalism?

arghhh...love the attention hate the thieves

What you see here is my flickr stats.  Love the attention and views per image are wonderful on the business side.  I'm suspect of huge increases on any given day if I didn't do anything in particular to drive traffic to my flickr sets.

On the left of this chart is the spike from the 2010 Mustang Launch and the LA Auto Show in the latter half of November.  Entirely expected as I blogged it on metblogs and linked to my flickr for the images themselves.  Added bonus is that those looking at the cars took the time to look at my flickr sets sorted to my various artistic explorations.  Its all good.

The spike on the right side of the chart is maddening.  Why?  ITs all images of the 2010 Camaro.  GM should be pleased that this car is generating some attention, lord knows they need some excitement in their showrooms.  

What is bad is all those hits also involved the theft of my images.  Yes, I found out people are swiping my copyrighted images and using for wallpapers and who knows what else without permission (or being paid for them).  With the exception of a couple images, most never were more than journalistic recording of the car so I really never intended them for sale.  What irks me is the just linking to and swiping them with out asking.  So...the Camaro set is now down to "friends and family" view as the saleable ones are among those being swiped.  Trust me on this should I see any show up in some poster showroom there will be hell to pay.

Thieves.  Eventually they will get theirs.