On my blog, posting a good picture along with the article is really important to me and I spend a lot of time in what would normally be called post production to correct images to make them as good as they can be. I ended up spending about 45 to 60 minutes with my photo editing software on the above picture and ended up with this one:

Admittedly not a great picture but I think it was quite a bit better that the original.

I’ve found that I am forced to shoot pictures in restaurants without a flash as it is pretty much impossible to get a good picture at close distances with a flash. Most of them end up like this one. Completely blown out and over-exposed and virtually unrecoverable even with photo-editing software:

Other pictures require less editing for exposure but more to improve the composition. The following before and after pictures show the kinds of changes that I usually have to make the improve a picture. In this example, I really just removed a bunch of the extra sections of the picture to draw the maximum focus to the restaurant’s sign.

The resolution of the pictures on my blog have gone through several changes over the past two years. My early postings used a relatively smaller picture as I wanted to keep the sizes of the images small to make the web pages load faster.

Stage 1: image size 300×225 pixels

As I became more knowledgeable and learned new techniques with my photo editing software, I found that I could keep the same image size but increase the image resolution. I went through one more step before settling on the current image resolution of 475×355 pixels.

Stage 2: image size 420×315 pixels

Stage 3 (present): image size 475×355 pixels

While I’m at home I can retake as many pictures as I need until I get the perfect picture. In general, pictures taken of food or ingredients are taken on my bread board as the lighting by my kitchen window usually result in well exposed pictures (like this one) that require almost no changes other than cropping:

Overall, I’ve found that I’m relying more and more on my photo-editing skills due to the regularity of returning home from a dimly lit restaurant with underexposed (dark) pictures. I see this as unavoidable but at the end of the day I believe that a good picture is a critical part to posting an interesting blog article.

Baden

According the the stats on my site, I seem to be averaging about 70 new articles a year. This averages out to about 1-2 new articles a week but as most of my regular readers know there are some weeks where I may not write anything and some weeks (especially when on vacation) where I will write several in one week.

When I happen to be at home, there isn’t more than a few days that go by that I am not thinking about my next article and sometimes there are 3-4 articles in progress at any one time. I have this belief (probably wishful thinking) that all of my regular readers log into their computers each day, anxious to see if there is a new article on my blog – only to have their day ruined not to see anything new posted. Nonetheless, this is what motivates me to get that next article written and put on the blog site. That and also the fact that I kind of like doing all of this.

One of the critical components of any of my articles are the pictures. There have been more than one article that has never made it to the web site because the accompanying picture turned out to be a disaster and not having the right picture to me is a deal killer. I have spent a lot of hours getting proficient with my photo editing software software and have found that I can recover most any bad picture into a usable one to go with an article but unfortunately some are just impossible to fix.

Since my return back from Germany last October, most of you know that the majority of my postings have been food and cooking-related with very few articles on the subject of travel. This, of course, is fairly normal for this time of year but the subject of travel will very soon become front and centre again as Barb and I are in the middle of planning a little get-away in the next couple of months.

Stay tuned.

Baden

At that time, my blog was slowly increasing in readership and was ranked at the number three spot on Google searches for “excellent adventure”.

Yes, I know, some may say that this is a dubious honour, at best.

Nonetheless, I recently had noted that my site had overtaken another website called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Online Adventure (www.billandted.org) and was now rated as the number two page ranked site.

For those of you on the outside of the blogging world (known as the blogosphere to us on the inside) you might not appreciate the significance of Google range rankings but suffice to say that we think about these kinds of things all the time (when not thinking up new articles to write about).

As it stands right now, all that stands in the way of my blog site reaching the coveted number one page ranking position is the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure section of the hugely popular imdb.com (the Internet Movie Database) web site. If my blog site were to manage to replace the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure site as the number one page ranked site, my life would be complete and there would be nothing left to accomplish.

Well, maybe more of the food and travel stuff.

Baden

Quoted in the October online edition of the National Geographic Traveller web site (see the reference to my site here under Blogs), I actually first became aware of this about a week ago when I started seeing entries in my web site’s access logs which shows connections from the National Geographic web site.

I think that this is pretty cool!

Baden