Continuing my monthly status reports of my progress here on Creative Splurges, it’s time to look back at February and see if it was any good.
In general, February cannot be said to be as successful as January; there were half the number of posts, something I blame simply on work life forcing me back into an approximately weekly posting schedule. That said, I am very pleased with the quality of posts that comprised February.
I started the month with a post on the Chinese New Year celebrations from London that I had shot at the end of January. This had been planned as a trip to get some interesting new photographs, but bad light and the heavy crowding meant I came home with quite a few bland images. I used the opportunity to experiment with post-processing techniques to give the photos some life, something I had begun to do in the previous month in my Sights and Sounds of London Town post. Selective desaturation, digital background blurring and what I term ‘selective chromatic removal’ – removing certain colours from an image, rather than monochroming certain parts of an image – all made an appearance.
Ironically, my favourite photo from the ones taken at the celebrations is a shot that could have been taken pretty much anywhere.
I still can’t quite put a reason on why I like this image, but I do.
February was home to two posts that were shot in January – both Chinese New Year and my brief return to the ‘London at night’ theme were intended to be January posts, but I did have the time to complete the write-up before the month was out. This was a little disappointing in some ways, as London at Night Revisited was not posted until four weeks after the trip that spawned it. It is always my intention on Creative Splurges to get posts written up and published as soon after the fact as possible, but sometimes life – and more interesting posts – can get in the way.
Although short, my second London night trip had a few good images in it. The temptation is to always go for long exposures when shooting at night, but I like the mix things up a bit and try ISO-pushing short shutter speeds from time to time. The ‘London at night’ theme is one I expect to return to on occasion (spoiler: there’ll be another short post on the subject in March), but expect to see far less on the motif during the summer months when the days are longer and I have to wait around longer for the sun to bugger off.
Of the handful of posts that made it into February, Frosty Macro was the most popular. 14 of my fellow bloggers ‘liked’ the post, a record for this site. I’m pleased with the post, it gave me a lovely chance to play about with my beloved macro lens and I didn’t even have to venture too far from the house to get the shots, but I’m not entirely sure what it was about it that vibed so well with my readers.
Also in February, I revived my fledgling Instagram category. It had been months since I last posted my results from the iPhone app, or even used the app much at all, but I had been gradually building up a backlog of interesting images and finally had enough to post a set. Typically, in the time it took me to put together the post, I’d added half a dozen more and so posted fifteen images instead of nine, although many of them would have been familiar to anyone who follows me on Twitter or Instagram.
My favourite posts of the month, however, were my two portrait posts. I’d have preferred there to only be one, but a few days after posting the initial Portraits post I found a few other great shots that I couldn’t resist including in a quick followup post. The posts are pretty different from my usual fare, in part because the style of the photography is so dissimilar to what I usually post, but mainly because the post was a gradually assembled post that I actually began at the beginning of January, containing photos on a theme, regardless of when or where they were taken. Due to the nature of how I work on this blog you won’t see that sort of post all that often but there are a few other potential subjects that could be the basis for one in the future.
From a stats point of view (which is a point of view I enjoy), Creative Splurges had almost half the amount of views during February than it did in January (294 in February compare to 538 in January). This isn’t all that bad considering there was half the amount of posts published, but I’m not exactly setting the world on fire yet. I did, however, blow through the 3,000 all-time hits barrier, and currently have 3,269. February also saw this blog’s 80th post.
Spinoff blog The Daily Photo has been doing pretty well for itself too. It has maintained its post-a-day remit for two whole months, and only three out of the sixty-three posts thus far haven’t had at least one ‘like’ from someone. Statistically speaking, The Daily Photo has had more hits this calendar year than Creative Splurges, although the figures are pretty close (Creative Splurges: 842; The Daily Photo: 889). Of course, The Daily Photo posts every day, so each post is getting comparatively less hits than one on this site. It was also helped in February by a random retweet from a local community Twitter account that saw a record number of daily hits (85).
So that was February. So what for March? Well, much like last month, a few posts shot in February have been carried over, and I already have a couple more posts in predatory stages that were shot in March. And hopefully I’ll remember to complete my monthly report sooner to the end of the month next time.
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
Rob
Creative Splurges 