I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and Santa brought you everything you asked for. I got a great surprise to day that I made it into the second round of voting for the win a laptop competition over at The Thinking Blog to win a RuffPC Laptop.

If you voted in the first round, thankyou very much but here we go again. I am now no 9. in the second round. So if you think my review is deserving to win a laptop then please vote for me again.

Thanks again.

Since this competition is now over I have re-edited this post and I am now supporting another win a laptop cometition. Check out my Win a Laptop post for more details

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I just want to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas. I hope you have a wonderful and joyful time and really enjoy spending this special time of year with your family. If you are taking photos on Christmas Day, just remember to try and get the expressions on peoples faces as they open presents. Theres nothing like the look of genuine surprise on Christmas Day. Oh yeah, dont spend all day behind the camera, I will let you have one day off a year.

For all the Australian girls and boys here is an Aussie Santa Tracker Link . Read what santa has been doing to prepare for his flight and track his journey tonite.

For those of you in America heres another fun Santa Tracker link. Track santa across the globe as he makes his journey to all the girls and boys delivering christmas cheer. If you have google earth installed you can follow in 3D.

Santa Tracker Link

Heres another Santa Tracker Link as well as other fun Christmas games.

I hope you’ve all been good girls and boys and nobody gets a lump of coal in their stocking.

HO HO HO!!!

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31

Matt only managed 25 but I think its because he is so short and is a self confessed uber Mac nerd. Now if it was number of 5 year olds he could take on in a Mac-Off then he would win for sure. Funny!

 Go check it out here and see how many you could take.

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The time has come to vote on the Win a RuffPC Laptop. My entry has been included and I am entry no 59 to so get along to vote for me so I can win a laptop:

The Thinking Blog

Please cast your vote for me so I dont have a repeat event of being stuck without a computer. There are some pretty good votes been made so far but if you feel like I deserve it then please vote for my entry.

Update

As the win a laptop cometition has now ended I am supporting another win a laptop competition. follow the link to see more details.

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Strobist is great for any kind of photography tutorials in most tricky light situations. Its well worth looking around at all the different assignments and courses they run over there. I highly recommend the Lighting 101 and 102 courses. They have helped improved my off camera flash photography many times over. I believe the photography community owes alot to Strobist for helping to lift the standard of photos everywhere!

The How To Photograph Christmas Lights post provides some great tips about getting the best from your adventures around the magical lighting wonderland at this time of year. I would just like to emphasize the part about your foregrounds. Strong foregrounds make a strong photograph. If you are taking your kids then make sure they get in a few as well, the looks on kids faces are the best at light displays. Something so simple brings such a lot of joy to the little people.

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Flickr

For all of you Flickr addicts out there who upload mountains of photos all at once, you will be able to set titles, descriptions, keywords and sets all before you click the upload button. No more having to manually edit individual photos once they are on the server. It still has the great drag and drop interface from the original version.

Heres what the Flickr Blog has to say about it:

The all new version for Windows and Mac OS X makes it easy to add titles, tags and descriptions to photos, add them to sets and adjust each photo’s privacy settings. Plus, for the first time ever, you can reorder your photos before uploading by simply dragging them into place!

When you start Uploadr for the first time you’ll have to authorize it with Flickr (just like the old Uploadr). But, you don’t have to do this right away. Version 3.0 lets you work offline while adding and organizing your photos. When you’re ready, you can click Sign In and you’ll be taken to Flickr to finish up. When you get back, you’re all set and Uploadr will remember your account for next time.

Drag your photos into the Uploadr to get started tagging and describing. When you’ve got everything just so, click the big Upload button and away they’ll go. Once you start an upload in version 3.0 you can immediately add more photos and start to tag and organize them, all while the first batch is being sent to Flickr. You can continue to upload new batches like this to your heart’s content!

I have already downloaded my copy and cant wait to upload new photos. I have had a look at it all and it looks great but since I have been so busy lately with the blog I havent been out to take any new photos. Tomorrow night I am off to see the Christmas lights and plan to take my camera along so I will test run it with those. Expect a tutorial on Photographing Christmas Lights as well.

Another great addition to Flickr Tools is the addition of Stats for Pro accounts. I have activated mine but wont be live until tomorrow so I will let you know how they go while I’m at it. To activate yours go to your Flickr homepage and hover you mouse over the ‘You’ heading. In the dropdown menu click on your stats. Just follow the prompts and you will have your Flickr Stats up and running in no time at all.

Update:

Stats are up and running quite successfully. As it happens it only took about an hour instead of the day that they estimated. The results are quite interesting too. The majority of my views come directly from Google Images while Flickr itself sends me the majority of the rest. The statistics go into quite a bit of detail as well being able to see graphs of viewing trends for individual photos as well as search terms and referrers. Excellent addition Flickr, I am very impressed.

Interestingly though I did find that the Chairpage.com forums for Silverchair fans has sent quite a bit of traffic my way for my ‘hotness’ photo of Daniel Johns from the Groovin The Moo Festival in Maitland last year. Its amazing how far your images can make it across the globe from downtown Newcastle.

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RSSHugger is a website to help bring you the reader closer to blogs that provide post about information you are interested in. Blogs are submitted and your feeds are listed allowing people to go straight to the info they are after. I have only played with it for about 15 minutes and was able to find some great new blogs about photography and making money off your blog.

 The top 100 list is reset every month so anyones blog is able to make it there driving more traffic straight to your door.

If you are looking for bringing readers closer to the content you provide I really think that RSSHugger is well worth a look 

I will monitor my traffic and let you know how it has helped improve my stats next month

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As a person always on the lookout for great little inventions that make life easier I have to say that the FOZI Tripod is one of the handiest I have come across in a long time. The convenience and functionality is brilliant and its Cheap! For something so simple and compact, it really has the potential to change peoples lives and make it so much easier. For those of you with point and shoot cameras it will really improve your photography as well by reducing dud photos due to camera shake.

For as gadget that is the size of a credit card, that you can carry in your wallet, I think that the small price you pay is a bargain for great photos. As well as that you no langer have to ask some stranger to take a photo for you. Sit your camera in the FOZI and set the timer.

For a complete review head over to my mates blog Mathewpacker.com and check it out in action. He has one in his hot little hands and just loves it as well. He proves its not just good for for cameras but also your iPod Touch and Playstation Portable. I’m sure heaps of people will come up with other great uses for it as well.

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For those of you who read my last post about how My Computer Has Died I had decided it is time to buy a laptop. In my efforts to start looking around for a new laptop I came across a competition to win a laptop. Now that suits my needs in two ways, cheap and solves my problem. In my original post I was entering a competition to win a laptop but that has ended so to keep information up to date I decided to support a fellow bloggers win a Macbook AIR competition instead. This post has been rewritten to best maximise an old post and build on the win a laptop traffic I have been getting.

So over at Shoemoney.com he is having a Win A Laptop Competition. Its really easy to enter, just leave a comment somewhere on the Shoemoney website and if you are randomly chosen you can go in the monthly draw to win a laptop – a MacBook Air to be exact.

Thanks to sposnorship by ACS Consulting the Macbook air will be given away on the 1st September. So get in ASAP and leave a comment (dont leave a crap comment cause thats not cool) somewhere on his blog where you think you can add to the conversation.

After this competition has ended in September I will update this post again with a new Win a Laptop competition

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When starting out with monetisation it is easy to get caught up in the hype and potential all the big blogs go on about but one thing to keep in mind with making money from your blog is that it takes time to build traffic streams and not all visitors are interested in clicking on links from your site. Dont lose heart, keep everything out in the open and dont appear to be a shifty money maker or people wont trust you.

I currently receive a small amount of income from 2 different streams, adsense and affiliate sales. Adsense sends ads to my site that match the content of my articles( welll most of the time it does) and the affiliate ads are only for products that I use, have used or know are good quality. My main aim of this blog is to show people my photos, not to make a fortune so I dont heavily advertise websites here anyway. Keep it simple and not too crowded and if you get a visitor who is interested in the links you provide they just might click your ads.

A third income stream I am looking at implementing soon is direct advertising on the blog where people can deal directly with me for adspaces. I am not sure how I will implement this one yet.

For simple easy to manage income streams you cant go past Afilliate marketing where you direct people to a certain website and you can be paid per click, per lead or per sale. For each style of visit you are paid a predetermined amount for your traffic. Some affiliate programs worth checking out are:


Clixgalore have a great range of programs with varying commissions and reliable payouts.

Commission Monster have easy to use banners and a great range of easy to join programs.

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