Yesterday, on August 27th, was the first anniversary of this blog! One year is of course a ridiculously short period of time and I doubt that anybody remembers her first anniversary. Figuratively, this blog is still an infant. However, one year - the first year - is still a significant period with profound development and growth. Including this short post, this blog featured 74 articles in its first year (a little over 1.4 per week) and according to Google it obtained more than 7600 page views (although I am not certain what this exactly means because different tools report different numbers). By a very large margin, the majority of visitors came from the USA, followed by Switzerland and Germany. Although this blog is mainly about photography, and in particular about photographs that I have taken myself, the two most popular posts were about "other" artist. The most visited text was the "my treasures" post on Ueli Lüthi, which was followed by the similar post on Rudolf Mirer. I am glad that these two contributions about artists that I like were appreciated.

The first candle (is a match in this case).
 

Most important for me was the fact that I enjoyed launching and maintaining this blog and that it attracted visitors with very little advertisement. One of the only forms of advertisement that I did was to register Florian's blog at Photoblogs, where quite a few people found it and commented from time to time (thank you!). I have even realized just now that this blog is listed by two Photoblog members in their blog lists (Landlicht and Trompe-l'oeil), which is very kind indeed (thank you very much!). The texts that I enjoyed writing the most were those of the "my photo treasures" series. Except for one case, every photographer that I asked allowed to show one of his photographs (thank you very much!) and my inquiry sometimes resulted in short "e-mail conversations", which was nice.
In contrast to this blog, the demons from the social media abyss such as Twitter, Google+, Flickr or  Facebook (which I do not use at all) do not suit me well. I have no time and energy to also engage in media that require constant attention and I am also far too deliberate for such spontaneous "chat". A blog is a medium that I like me much better! Therefore, I am glad to go about the second year of Florian's blog and hope that I will manage to regularly write and continually attract readers and visitors from far and close. If you have a comment, suggestion or question for "my" second year, please let me know!

I thank everybody for visiting and hope that you enjoy!

Florian.

The last fall color leaves resisting the approaching winter.

Dear readers!

According to the analytics, today the thousandth pageview on Florian's blog was recorded. A few of those were from myself (even though they should not be counted) but the majority was from visitors like you from all over the world (most from Switzerland and the USA, followed by visitors from Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Turkey, India, France, Canada and Latvia). The larger part of you seems to be using Apple computers (about 55%), but accesses from Android devices were twice as frequent as from iPads. But I digress and do not want to reduce you to a number in the statistics of this blog, but rather wholeheartedly thank you for stepping by from time to time, for reading and looking at my photographs. I hope that you enjoyed one or the other photograph, discovered an interesting idea or learned something from one of the texts. I would be glad to welcome you again in the future and hope that some of you will become regular visitors!

I would also like to use this opportunity to thank Gianni Galassi, Christopher Burkett, Tom McLaughlan and Paul Nicklen, who have permitted me to show one of their photographs in the "My photo treasures" series. I hope that I can continue this series and introduce you to many more photographers and photographs that I appreciate. For example, I hope to show you one of my most preferred landscape photographs ever - stay tuned! If you have a photograph or photographer who you think I should know and maybe highlight here, please drop me a line!

In comparison with other sites, a thousand pageviews may seem little, but I am very happy with the number of visitors and my blogging experience so far. Since August 27th, 29 post were published (this is post 30), which means that I posted about three posts per week. Sometimes I had to force myself to sit down and write a new text and a few times I deleted what I had written, but overall I enjoyed this writing experience so far and the ideas for posts came naturally. I hope that I can manage to keep up the same frequency in the future. I also find a thousand pageviews (a little bit more than 10 per day) so far respectable because I have done very little advertisement for my blog and I deliberately refrain from certain topics (for example I do not mention the latest cameras and lenses from Canikon, Leitax or Lumipus, which would certainly bring in additional page visits). I will mention tools and techniques from time to time, as I have already, but I will most likely continue to abstain from brand and equipment fanaticism. I try to live by certain principles, even if they may be disadvantageous to some extent (I strongly believe that in the long term they pay off, but this may be a topic for a (photo)sophical post one day).

I do not want to end without saying THANK YOU for your visit again and to encourage you to let me know if you have any suggestion, questions, requests or criticism.

Have a nice day!
Florian.