Well, I was hoping to have some pictures of the New Years Eve Fireworks from downtown, but the City of St. John’s officially postponed them due to high winds.

So, I’ll probably have them on here tomorrow.

In the mean time, I’ve got some other bursts of colour. We were out running errands a few nights ago when I noticed how pretty the various lights looked thru the wet glass of the car.

Think “Whizzzzz! *BOOM!* Ahhh!”

I’d like to thank everyone for visiting the blog and putting up with my insane ramblings. I’m gonna try to keep up the daily posts as long as possible – it’s sorta become second nature to take a camera along when I head out the door now, so it should be… interesting.

Have a very Happy New Year!

Tags: night shot, rain, wet glass, window

It turns out that, according to the "Why are you here?" pole, more than half the visitors just come to view the pics. That’s pretty much what we thought. The breakdown is 62% like looking, and 38% are into photography.

So, for each group, here are a few links.

Looking:

• Check out Keith Horlick’s collection of Old Newfoundland Photos. I just found out about that through one of the links below. I also just received for Christmas Paul O’Neill’s The Oldest City, The Story of St. John’s, Newfoundland, so those photos are of particular interest to me.
• Karen Chappell’s Bitstop, a photo-a-day blog that has been on the go for two years now.

Shooting:

• I’ve been visiting a new forum site for local photographers on-and-off for the last few days. Check it out at www.nlphotographers.com.
• Photo.net is a site I’ve been visiting for years. Any time I’ve ever wanted to ask a question, I’ve always found that it’s already been asked and answered by looking back through their forums. An excellent resource.

As the number of unique visitors to this blog has continued to climb, it’s been a topic of debate amongst the minion and myself about where you guys are coming from. Mainly the discussion gets down to “Are the visitors just wanting to see pictures, or are they interested in photography?”

The stats can help us sorta guess at that, but I thought it’d be interesting (and fun) to simply ask the question…

[poll=2]

You can vote only once – after that all you’ll see are the results. You can also check the sidebar (to the left, off the home page) for a running total.

The Blog is One! Happy Birthday!

Feel free to sing a song for it, but not the one that you’re thinking about – you may get sued.

Check out the temporary Splash Page. We’ve blatantly ripped off the Google Holiday Logo idea for Easter. The model is Jennifer.

Speaking of Google, they’re up to it again. Not just one April Fools Day Joke this year, but
two!

Interestingly, Wikipedia had commentary on these two newest jokes almost immediately. Check out the history of Google’s antics – they’re cracked. They keep them online too – PigeonRank, for example, is a classic.

As you can see, we have a newly designed Blog. Along with it is a new address…

wordpress.NewfoundlandPhotographer.ca

Pointers will remain in place at the old address for quite some time.

This new design has been integrated with the Sessions site as well, also with a new address…

sessions.NewfoundlandPhotographer.ca

Because of some nifty configuration nuances, old links to the Sessions site will continue to work as before – no redirection needed.

This sorta marks the beginning of the end for the old www.KimGoodyear.com site – meaning the old address as well as the old site.

Oh-my-gosh! Why – you may ask? Well, it all has to do with New vs. Return visits.

For most people, this is about to get very boring.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we’ve noticed a growing number of New and Return visits to the Blog. It’s chugging along quite well. At the same time, New visits to the main site are also going along fairly well, although not quite as good. All this stuff is due to a number of factors – extremely tedious stuff about robots and search phrases and ugly database tools.

The problem, it turns out, is Return visits to the main site. It’s easy to see what’s happening – why would anyone want to visit a static site and rummage around for new content when they can just regularly check a Blog (or News page) for recent updates. Looking at the stats, we can see the same thing happening at the weddings site.

Web sites are designed – put online – they get some visits – the whole thing may or may not be updated a few times – then the visits drop off. Soon after, the owner looses interest in making updates, and they decide it must be the fault of the site. So they redesign, and the process begins again. The beginning of one of these cycles is usually right about the same time that someone says…. “Hey, I know… let’s add music!”

So, what’s my point? Fresh Content = More Visits? That’s certainly no great revelation. But is redesigning a site with basically the same old crap, over and over, fooling anyone? Well, other than the person paying for it… ?

So it turns out that this has been a common problem with web sites pretty much since some guy first stuck some file on some computer on some network.

Generally then, our idea (and it’s certainly not a new idea, but we’ve come to this on our own), is to make this (what you’re looking at) the web site, and hang everything off here. Basically, The Blog will become The Site, and the archives will become The Content. Trust me – it’s all very Web 2.0ish.

Anyway, thoughts and comments on this new design are welcome. I think the whole look and feel is sorta inspired by our latest favorite new toy. We’ve still got a few problems to iron out involving photos in past posts. All the old stuff (whoops! not old stuff – Content) from the former Blog and Sessions site is still available at those new addresses.

…I told you it’d be boring.

PS. I’d like to thank Andreau and Angus for their help with this switch over. Once we decided to jump in and tear it all apart, the whole redesign took less than 3 hours. And that’s also in no small part possible because of the excellent open source software that runs the show.

I find myself sending detailed directions to my place quite often. Although we are currently undergoing the longest renovation in history (three years and counting!), I’ve setup a studio in a spare room of my home that is suitable for Modeling Shoots, Grad Sessions and stuff like that (basically any small group).

After typing these same directions in email several dozen times, I thought I’d just do one entry in the blog and point anyone that needs to know to this post.

So here goes…

My address is:
379 Hamilton Avenue Extension.
St. John’s, NL, Canada. A1E 1K4.

View Larger Map
It’s in the west end of St. John’s.

Click on that map to check out an interactive version courtesy of Google. Select “View Larger Map” to zoom and get detailed, illustrated directions from your own address.

 

Detailed Driving Directions:

Driving North on Topsail Road…
which turns into Cornwall Avenue (traveling away from the Village Mall toward downtown). You’ll drive past O’Regan Agencies and Scotia Bank (left side). Hamilton Avenue Extension is just past the bank. Take a hard left and you’re on Hamilton Avenue Extension. My place is the second house on the right.

If you go past Colonial Garage and Canadian Home Furnishings, you’ve gone too far and missed the turn off – turn yourself around and read the next bit.

Driving South on Lemarchant Road…
this turns into Hamilton Avenue Extension, but you’d never know it (traveling away from downtown, toward the Village Mall). Basically, just keep driving till you come to Colonial Garage (on your left) and Canadian Home Furnishings (on your right). Turn right just after Canadian Home Furnishings and go straight. Note that one road turns again to your right – don’t take that one – go straight. I’m the second house on your left.

The House

As you can see, it’s a Big Yellow House. This place was once a Candy Factor, a Hair Salon, a Boarding House and who knows what else. Now I live here.

Please Note: The entrance is not in the front – it’s down the left side of the building, around the back and up the stairs (all the way around the back and up two flights of stairs). Go up all the stairs to the top floor – it’s quite a climb.

Parking is available in the Scotia Bank lot next door, or you can park on the street directly in front of the house.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to give me a call at 754-0735.

Thanks!

Kim Goodyear

There’s not been much activity here lately, mostly because I haven’t been at much in relation to photography. We’re in the process of renovating our home – a complete tear out – so it’s been what seems like one of the longest renovations in history. We had the major work done professionally, but have been trying to complete the finish work in our spare time, of which there is very little. I’ve been trying to use this slow bit before Christmas to get more done on that.

So I’m also trying to arrange a few TFP modeling shoots for the coming weeks – maybe a few before Christmas, but mostly after. Some of the usual crowd that I work with have taken a break as well, so I’m trying to find a few people to get involved, most importantly a markup artist. I’ve also got some new equipment on the way so I’ll be itching to try that out…

On the wedding front – we’ll be offering a new service for next season. We’re doing some research into coffee table books. These are basically professionally printed and bound photography books that contain pictures of… well anything really… I’ve had some done with my travel photography for example. For the weddings though, it will be select pictures from the client’s day. There’s quite a range of services out there, so we’re looking at offering something at a good price, but more importantly, with excellent quality. From what I’ve seen so far, this is clearly a situation of “you get what you pay for”. As I said, we’ve been in touch with a few vendors and have looked at samples, but we’re ordering some of the higher end stuff to see what all the fuss is about. Stay tuned.

The new wedding site has gone online. There are a number of improvements and we’ll be working on more stuff over the coming days and weeks.

We now have an unprecedented amount of photographic content on that site – the number of images can be measured in the thousands. One of the goals of the new design is to make that abundantly clear to a new visitor, and as such, we have a rotating banner at the top of each page. Each time a page is loaded, a script on the server selects a new banner with pictures from our coverages to display at the top. There’s only about ten banners right now, but I’ve tasked a minion on adding many more.

Some other changes and improvements are listed on the news page. We’ve considered going all the way by adding a blog to that site as well, but I think one is enough!

And in other news… we’re covering a wedding this weekend that I’ve really been looking foward to – hint: there will be six Olympic Gold Medalists attending, and one of them will be getting married. Any guesses?

A new site has been put online from last weekend.

Link: Evely / Hiscock August 2006

Joelene and Matthew were married in Victoria last Friday. The weather was perfect when we shot the couple – we got some really nice stuff of Matt in his RCMP uniform and some great shots of Joelene as she played it up for the camera like a pro – stunning. Another example here of a couple that were willing to have a bit of fun and were very open to ideas. I think it shows in their pictures.

There’ll be another photo web site from last Saturday’s wedding online by Monday.

The observant visitor may have noticed that we haven’t updated the links from the Client’s page of the wedding site for the last few coverages. There’s a reason for that. We’ve had the minion (and the minion’s associate – thanks Andreau!) working on a redesign of the site. We’ve set a cutoff on updates to the old design in an effort to get the work completed on the new one – a difficult task, especially during a very busy season.

We’ve got some vacation days coming up, so that gives us a chance to get more work done. :) More later this weekend.