@causeisaidso
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April 27, 2013 at 10:42 pm in reply to: 4-24-13 – I Went to___ and All I Got Was This Lousy___ #50766
CauseISaidSo
ParticipantAnother week, another early close. Congrats to Ranger Joe/camerflage on his sweep of individual and combined! And congrats also to clouddancer on her best ever showing! I really thought you were gonna pull off the tie for first.
ParticipantI can only comment on the teleconverter option. I’ve got a 1.4x which I used with my 70-200 to shoot my son’s football games. I was very pleased with it for that usage. Now that he’s out of that, I’ve found that a lot of the times when I want to use it, I wish I had more.
I went with the 1.4x instead of the 2x because you only lose 1 stop with it instead of 2. Since a lot of games are at night under lights, you need every stop you can get.
Overall, I think the 1.4x is a bit pricey for the boost you get (but again, it served my purpose perfectly). Photowise, I couldn’t see any degradation when using the TC. If you go with a TC, IIRC the 2x is about the same cost at the 1.4x, so if you can tolerate losing 2 stops, I’d definitely go with the 2x.
annual servicing
I’ve seen this mentioned a couple of times. Is this a thing? Is annual servicing recommended? I’ve never had it done with either of mine, so I’m wondering if it’s something I should be doing…
ParticipantNice, chupa. How’re you enjoying the temps these last couple of mornings? We broke low temp records today & yesterday.
April 25, 2013 at 3:54 am in reply to: 4-24-13 – I Went to___ and All I Got Was This Lousy___ #50763ParticipantI shot all new for this one, but it may be my last for a little while; the next couple of weeks are going to be pretty hectic for me.
ParticipantMine’s roughly 105mm and strikes a good balance between functionality and style (visible can).
That sounds like a good option to me.
ParticipantI’m sure y’all have heard the joke about the two statisticians hunting, right? They both shot at a deer. One missed wide wide right, the other missed wide left, they then looked at each other and exclaimed, “We got him!” So, perhaps Fark has statisticians working on the closing bug? 😉
Anyway, congrats to oddmind on the individual win and to bender16v on the combined!
ParticipantWhat an excellent opportunity and experience – Congrats, orionid!
I don’t see myself ever doing any professional stuff, or at least no non-landscape/still life. It’s pressure enough taking free posed shots of extended family! So, you definitely have my respect there.
Participant//digress One thing I miss, CISS from the old stat forum is the little graph showing growth in votes over time. Though given today’s numbers the NVC average would better display that.
Yeah, I know, sorry. It’s something I really want as well and it’s next on my list if I can ever get a stretch of free time.
ParticipantThe last time I mentioned Fark/Farktography on G+ was to another farktographer (who hasn’t been around as of late). The next comment was from Thomas Hawk “LOL. People still go to fark?” That made me feel about an inch tall, and frankly a little pissed. I guess I suck at teh interwebs because I’ve never been to reddit. I probably couldn’t even spell it.
Well, I don’t know who Thomas Hawk is (guessing a pro photographer?), so his opinion doesn’t mean a lot to me. Maybe a good response would’ve been, “Well, only the cool kids.” 😉
As for reddit, meh, unless you’re an ultra-liberal, US-hating, militant atheist with a houseful of cats (no offense meant to any here that might harbor any shade of any of those views, unless it’s the “US-hating” part, in which case, F you), you’re not missing anything. I mostly browse there just to keep up with the latest memes so I have some idea of what my kids are talking about. 🙂
Edited to add: Perhaps I should clarify that last paragraph. I have absolutely no problem with anyone having those opinions (except as noted); it’s just the in-your-face nature of the presentation of those views that’s so prevalent there that I don’t care for. The majority of the user base seems to be late teens who are in that “I’ve just figured out the universe and I know the absolute truth” phase.
ParticipantI don’t think we’ve been considering our audience enough.
Well, here’s something: I was looking at the relative traffic for fark vs reddit (fark gets about 7% of the traffic that reddit does) and I noticed this:
So, fark is more relatively popular in India than the US and almost as relatively popular in Pakistan. Should we all brush up on our Hindi & Urdu? 🙂
ParticipantThere are a lot of ex-farkers that communicate through Facebook only now, they rarely visit the site (usually for the “EPIC” threads). Maybe we can focus on getting those people back participating/voting.
I’ve always been curious about that. When you really look at it, there are a LOT of regulars that no longer or very rarely participate. Have they just moved on? Is there something that drove them away, real-life stuff getting in the way, or has the allure of the contests just faded for them?
ParticipantThe non-porn internet is about learning and fun. I say the future is in being fun a place to learn. And yeah, that means busting out and making farktography.net more than a forum. Which is totally doable.
I think that’s a great idea. It ties in with what I was saying about unique or original content. And we have a LOT of great educational material already here in the forums; I think it just needs to be organized & presented in a more accessible way.
But first and foremost, the fun. Again, going beyond the contests, I think we ought to have a forum based photography display, in a non-contest format.
Another good idea. That’s actually kind of like one of my long-term wishes for bibliostats (assuming we’re all around long enough for me to get to it). I’d like to add an “About Me” profile page for each participant with a gallery to show non-contest stuff with commenting; kinda like a mini-flickr.
It’s also mostly already present here with the Gallery section, but again, it could probably benefit with a little organization and promotion.
There was a joint fark/reddit party in Chicago this weekend. Fark, being a teenager, has a much more established presence in the real world than reddit, and the redditors that showed up liked it. I’m sure Drew wouldn’t mind if farktography threads got posted to reddit. Reddit likes linking to things.
Good luck with that. I tried promoting farktography in the “Can I Get A Show of Hands?” contest with my An Experiment in Cross-Site Vote Whoring entry. I posted it to the pics subreddit along with a description of farktography and an invitation to join in and got no response. But maybe photo-specific subreddits would be more receptive.
ParticipantIt’s not that we aren’t welcoming of new people, new people just aren’t coming in.
There’s some truth in that, but I’m not entirely sure about it. There have been 24 newbs since 2012 that have participated in at least 4 contests:
UserName First Contest Last Contest # Contests
billc226 354 412 44
hunches 354 411 41
emiliogtz 359 412 30
Missed It 350 390 18
Mitt Romneys Tax Return 395 410 12
random.nic 369 396 11
prickle27 379 414 11
Robert Goulet 359 405 11
w11113 363 387 9
schuylkill 350 409 9
nmzp 352 362 8
ChronoSTALKER 380 386 7
D_PaulAngel 365 390 6
Wogus 370 375 5
cakeboss 370 379 5
Kenneth Snow 359 400 5
eyeoftheaxis 351 412 5
Amish Animal Scientist 406 413 5
Moriel 373 410 4
it's lisa e. 351 364 4
EatTheWorld 350 363 4
Spanky McStupid 360 383 4
Sio 408 414 4A few on that list have popped in here, but many haven’t. The first post always has a link to the forums and Els welcomes the newbs & kotters, but is there anything else we could do to make sure that everyone knows about the forums or otherwise feels appreciated for participating?
Second, casual photography contests like Farktography have been supplanted by Facebook and Instagram as places to have your work seen.
I think that’s a big part of the drop in casuals. Used to be, posting in a Farktography contest was a fairly unique way of being able to say “Hey, look at me, I’m on the interwebs!” That’s no longer anything close to a unique experience.
ParticipantI’m late to this conversation but wanted to comment on several points, so please excuse the multi-post blast you’re about to read.
First, the latest charts. You can see that everything took a nose dive right around the 4th quarter of 2011. What I find interesting is that even though the number of participants and entries has been on a gradual decline since the beginning, the average number of votes actually grew up until Q4 2011.
I’d be curious also to see a recent list of both the all time top vote themes and last, say two years worth of themes.
If you’re looking for quantity (total votes), here’s the list of all contests with 3000 or more votes:
Contest # Date Theme Votes
169 2008-07-30 I Tawt I Taw A Puddytat 5520
316 2011-05-25 Puddytats 2: I Did! I Did See a Puddytat! 4183
161 2008-06-04 Trees 4090
246 2010-01-20 Sunrise... Sunset... 3691
128 2007-10-17 Wallpaper This 3665
150 2008-03-19 Nature Photography 3559
301 2011-02-09 It's On The Travel Brochure 3301
168 2008-07-23 Blue II (Farktography Classic) 3282
299 2011-01-26 Weather 3141
15 2005-08-17 Night Time Photography 3117
281 2010-09-22 Green 2 (Farktography Classic) 3067
285 2010-10-20 Travel Photography 3047
231 2009-10-07 Black and White 2 (Farktography Classic) 3031
300 2011-02-02 Vote Whoring 3017
118 2007-08-08 Abandon All Hope 3002
244 2010-01-06 Animals 3000If you take it back 2 years (4/1/2011), all you get are 2011 contests:
Contest # Date Theme Votes
316 2011-05-25 Puddytats 2: I Did! I Did See a Puddytat! 4183
335 2011-10-05 Where The Wild Things Are 2841
338 2011-10-26 Graves 3: Return of the Land of the Dead 2796
313 2011-05-04 Cloudscapes 2668
330 2011-08-31 Pathways 2454
314 2011-05-11 Happy Farktography Anniversary 6 2402
337 2011-10-19 That's No Moonà 2242
320 2011-06-22 Volcanoes, Waterfalls, and Mountains 2195
331 2011-09-07 Black And White 3 (Farktography Classic) 2193
332 2011-09-14 Summer Daze 2184If you limit it to 2012 and later, it looks like this:
Contest # Date Theme Votes
350 2012-01-18 Straight Out Of Camera 2024
373 2012-06-27 Birds 2: Boid Watching 1957
348 2012-01-04 Desolation 1923
365 2012-05-02 Wow! Nice Wood! 1633
351 2012-01-25 Stoned 1611
359 2012-03-21 Curves 2: Recurves 1562
406 2013-02-13 Pets 1557
352 2012-02-01 Go Out and Get Some Strange 1447
370 2012-06-06 Vehicles 1402
363 2012-04-18 Sun In Frame 1398BUT, what if we look at quality instead of quantity? Here are the top 20 by average votes per entry:
Contest # Date Theme Votes/Entry
85 2006-12-20 Barbie (and Ken) 26.35
300 2011-02-02 Vote Whoring 18.62
297 2011-01-12 Five Is Right Out 18.08
214 2009-06-10 Tilt-Shift Faked Miniature Scenes 17.38
342 2011-11-23 Triptych Portraits 16.90
299 2011-01-26 Weather 16.19
343 2011-11-30 Dungeons & Dragons 16.07
202 2009-03-18 Tableau 15.89
301 2011-02-09 It's On The Travel Brochure 15.72
225 2009-08-26 Training Documents 15.41
368 2012-05-23 Sleeve-faced 15.40
335 2011-10-05 Where The Wild Things Are 15.36
314 2011-05-11 Happy Farktography Anniversary 6 15.30
316 2011-05-25 Puddytats 2: I Did! I Did See a Puddytat! 15.10
345 2011-12-14 Mandatory Procrastination 15.08
338 2011-10-26 Graves 3: Return of the Land of the Dead 15.03
239 2009-12-02 Win, Fail, or "I Like Where This Thread is Going" 14.95
291 2010-12-01 The Song Remains The Same 14.80
304 2011-03-02 I'm Beginning To See A Pattern Here... 14.52
125 2007-09-26 Everything's A Dollar/Pound/Euro 14.36I think the common denominator in a lot of those themes is that they allow for truly unique content, the type of thing someone’s going to facebook or tweet or otherwise forward. And I think that (unique content) is probably one of the only things that will drive more traffic to our contests. The problem, and I KNOW you all know this, is that unique content isn’t something you just pull out of a hat; it takes time & creativity, both of which are quantities with definite ebb & flow.
I like Farktography’s format. Each week has a lead-in, a beginning, middle and end. It’s a story that developes in front of you that you get to be part of. It’s FUN.
I like the way you put that. I agree.
ParticipantOn another statistical note, this was Elsinore‘s 364th contest, representing SEVEN UNINTERRUPTED YEARS of Farktographing – congrats Els!
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