Category: MISC

Miscellaneous while creating this site and around.

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Best Time to Upload and Get Popular on 500px

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UPDATE 3: recently 500px changed the website and you cannot see the number of likes anymore…

UPDATE 2: Now i’m continuing the test, but this time with an another account and a new picture. I’ll now wait the whole 24 hours period of 500px and upload only once a day.

Test Uploads, Score of the Picture according to 500px Pulse and the absolute Views/Likes/Favorites 
Date/Time 8 am 10 am 12 am 2 pm 4 pm 6 pm 8 pm 10 pm 12 pm 2 am
Monday  88.2
166/-/22		  88.9
170/27/4		 88
199/27/9		  90.5
197/32/8		  85.1
33/19/3
Tuesday 88.3
213/22/10		 90.6
219/31/7		 63,9
42/5/2
Wednesday 91.3
363/34/9		 89.7
146/25/11		 56,6
12/4/1
Thursday  87.7
393/23/6		  87.1
123/21/8		 iP  93.0
530/43/11
Friday
Saturday
Sunday 60.1
28/5/1		  85.0
97/18/4

UPDATE: I just stopped this test, because I realized, that the users rating is influencing the tests. When I was uploading normally my pictures before, the first Like was worth about 27 Pulse, the second something around 15 and so on. Whit my test is was upload 5-6 times per day the same picture. At the last day, a Like was worth 10 Pulse! With this, my test will deliver really bad results and completely destroy me repetition on 500px. I decided to slow down this test and upload the picture not so often anymore. Maybe I will use the whole 24 hours span of 500px to get the real rating.

I’m not completely sure how the algorithm works, but according to my findings, a click on Like is not worth 27 Pulse at all time and all users. Below, the rating of three pictures can be seen. (Sorry for German… 🙂 ) All of them have the same Likes and Favorites, but different Rating. All of them are from the “New” section at the same 10 minutes. And all of them had no comments. The first one is mine.  It seems that the view to like ratio does not influence the rating that much, since the third picture hat more views but a higher score. Whats left over, is the users rating. Correct me if i’m wrong!

Rating

Since some time I’m participate on 500px.com, to share my photos and get some feedback on the composition and processing etc. My choice felt to 500px.com because I don’t want to create an Yahoo account, I simply didn’t thought about Tumblr and I hate the iPhone majority on Instagram (yes, I have a rooted Android :P). Anyway, 500px offers with the rating system an interesting way of measure the, let’s say, “Beauty” of your pictures, compositions and processing. Also you can have the pictures still with a CC license (maybe the others have this as well, donno…). After I uploaded some photos I got exited. I was spending nights with watching other photos, like them and post some comments. On the other side my pictures get a relatively good rank and some nice comments. But, for high quality critics, go somewhere else. I had some nice rating over 90 and 95 also. 500px has a nice rating system called Pulse. If you want to sell pictures, a high rating, Pulse, is recommended.

Photograph Battle of the Nations Monument in Leipzig V2 by Thomas on 500px

Battle of the Nations Monument in Leipzig V2 by Thomas on 500px

Still my best one: The Battle of the Nations Monument in Leipzig.

When the days got longer, I had some time at the golden hour and blue hour to take some pictures.  I also had a new lens and I was still exited with my new 6D. I started photographing at 5 pm and ended at 9 pm or later. After that processing the pictures was not in my mood and I left that for the next day. So i stood up, made some processing and uploaded the pictures, let’s say, between 9:00 and 9:30 (CET) in the morning, three, four days in a row. I was really surprised that the rating where just around 70-80, sometimes less. Could it be that I’m, not like I thought a little bit good, really bad at photographing?

Photograph DC Tower Vienna by Thomas on 500pxBut I was going curious. I noticed also that the count of viewers where not that high like before. OK, no views, no likes, no rating. Even the best pictures of 500px have normally a 1-to-10 rating for “likes” to views and even less with “favorite“. So I made a simply test with one of my pictures. The photo on the right is the DC Tower in Vienna. Not the greatest picture, I know but a 80 worth for sure. The first time i uploaded this picture at around 9-10 AM CET, the pulse stood still after some hours, at around 70. The second time, I uploaded at 8 PM CET. And voilà, the pulse reached 90.7. Also the views where going from some under 100 to over 400. So there are clearly some good and bad times for uploading photos to 500px.

I decided to make a test with one of my newest pictures from Vienna. Also not a very good picture, but clearly worth a 80 or 85. I will upload this picture the next weeks to different time and will not interact with 500px at all, only to see the rating and the views after 2 hours and the upload to a different time again. I started today again at 9:30 AM CET. I’ll try to update this post recently to the latest results as soon as possible.

 

Test Uploads, Score of the Picture according to 500px Pulse and the absolute views
Date/Time 8 am 10 am 12 am 2 pm 4 pm 6 pm 8 pm 10 pm 12 pm 2 am
Monday 67.0
Tuesday  84.9 86.9
Wednesday 82.1  75.9 50.2  85.2 56.4 56,6/26
Thursday 65.6/34 68,6/24  69.8/35  58,5/21
Friday  39.6/8 iP
Saturday
Sunday

 

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Night Sky Photography Shutter Speed Calculator

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UPDATE: I’m glad to announce that I finally found the time to release the Night Fox Android App for my Shutter Speed Calculator!

Get it on Google Play

This is the shutter speed calculator for night sky photographing. Basically you just insert the data of crop factor, the megapixel you want to archive or your camera has, the focal length and the tolerance of pixels you can accept. The description of all these different factors is below. The description of the whole process can be found here.



















Link

Crop Factor
The crop factor is depending on your camera. It is influencing the field of view (FOV) of your camera, like the focal length also does. This calculator includes the factors 1 (3:2), 1.5 (3:2), 1.6 (3:2) and now also 2.0 (4:3). (Thx to Livio for the comment)
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_factor and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image).

Megapixel
This is the amount of megapixels you want to achieve. It can be the maximum of your camera or also a lower Value. I included this value, because somebody may what to have the pictures not in full resolution, but a maximum of exposure time. With a smaller resolution I’m recommending to reduce the pixel tolerance as well.

Focal Length
The focal length is very important for the field of view and therefore how fast the stars are moving. The rule of thumb is “the lower the better”. But be aware of the speed of your lens. This influences the needed exposure time as well.

Pixel Tolerance
Depending on what you can live with, you can adjust this value. Basically it describes the tolerance of how many pixels a star can “move”. In some cases 20 pixels are OK, but for having really sharp stars, I recommend 10 pixel.

The Milky Way Exposure Calculator can be found here and as well as the other articles of http://www.lonelyspeck.com/.

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WP Parabola Theme and Google Structured Data

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While setting up my Google Webmaster Tools I ran into the problem that WordPress in combination with the nice Parabola Theme is not 100% conformed the Google expectations. I saw some errors on the page and tried to figure out what exactly triggers this error. On the overview page I found these entries.

google webmaster tools failure

 

The crawler of Google searches for the hatom information on the page. For my page it finds most of the tags, like the author, the title, the content and also the publish date. But it searches also specific for the field “updated”. The failure occures more often on category sites, because there are more entries, and only once on the simple post.

After some research I found a solution by adding  some simple lines to some files in the theme. But because you still want to update your theme, the best way to edit your theme is by adding a child to the normal theme. This is basically done by creating a new folder under /wp-content/themes/ with the name %theme-name%-child. In my case this was “parabola-child”. After creating a child folder, a file named sytle.css has to be created in the folder. The basic setup is in my case:

/*
Theme Name:     TL-PHOTOGRPAHY
Theme URI:      http;//www.tl-photography.at
Description:    Customize Parabola
Author:         Thomas Leber
Author URI:     https://www.tl-photography.at
Template:       parabola
Version:        1.0.0
License:        GNU General Public License v3.0
*/

@import url("../parabola/style.css");

 The most important line is  Template: parabola. This tells WordPress that this is a child of the Parabola theme. All steps can be found here. WordPress will now load all files from the child folder and override the corresponding files of the main theme. Basically you can copy a file like header.php to the child theme and edit it. The rest of the files will be loaded from the main theme. In our case I searched the content.php and found a link to the parabola_posted_on() in includes/theme-loop.php function. This function provides the meta information of the post and can also be used to write the additional tags to the page. Unfortunately, after i copied and edited my file, WordPress was still loading the main file. This seems to be a bug or i did simply something wrong, ten times or so… Anyway, I decided to change in this case the content.php file. I copied the  snipped from here and added the “hidden=true” to prevent that information from rendering to the screen.

<h2 class="entry-title">
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php printf( esc_attr__( 'Permalink to %s', 'parabola' ), the_title_attribute( 'echo=0' ) ); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
</h2>
<span class="post-date published" hidden="true"><?php the_time( get_option( 'date_format' ) ); ?></span>
<span class="post-date updated" hidden="true"><?php the_modified_time( get_option( 'date_format' ) ); ?></span>
<?php cryout_post_title_hook(); 
?><?php if ( 'post' == get_post_type() ) : ?>
<div class="entry-meta">
  <?php parabola_posted_on(); 
    cryout_post_meta_hook();  ?>
  </div><!-- .entry-meta -->
<?php endif; ?>

After this modification, the category pages will have the hidden information and Google will crawl these pages without errors. But the single post will still have this failure. So again, after some searching, I figured out that this is related to the file single.php. So I added the same two lines there.

<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php cryout_post_title_hook(); ?>
<span class="post-date published" hidden="true"><?php the_time( get_option( 'date_format' ) ); ?></span>
<span class="post-date updated" hidden="true"><?php the_modified_time( get_option( 'date_format' ) ); ?></span>
<div class="entry-meta">
<?php parabola_posted_on(); cryout_post_meta_hook(); ?>
</div><!-- .entry-meta -->

 google_webmaster_tools_failure_detailIt seems that the theme also deliverers wrong data to the crawler when showing single posts. In the picture on the side,it is visible that it writes for the bookmark the date and not the name of the post. But i was fine with the result until now. Maybe i’ll fix this later or write a bug report to the programmer.