wordpress – Herman van Bon Photography

Feeling honoured

This morning I checked my social media portfolio and had a pleasant surprise. Ben Huberman of WordPress featured four landscape photographers and I’m one of those privileged. The photo below drew his attention and this is what Ben writes about my photography (I couldn’t have done it better).

“Born in the Netherlands and currently living in Napier, South Africa, Herman van Bon explores the poetic qualities of photography — sometimes literally, like in his series of photo haiku. His images highlight the ethereal beauty of the landscapes around him, and the above photo is no exception; we loved how so much of the visual action takes place in the sky, with terrestrial life — trees, grass — merely a secondary character in a much bigger story”.

The Jazz Singer

A week ago I published some pictures of a jazz concert on the blog of one of my clients. I only gave myself 90 minutes to select 12 pictures and process plus publish them on the different social media. It took 93 minutes and the blog post alone got within 2 days more than 600 hits according to WordPress statistics; several tweets plus over 120 shares on Facebook. Not too shabby for a new blog (first post end of January).

Anyway I redid one of the pictures; the one of the South African Lady of Jazz: Janet Marshall.

CV Enriching

Just got a nice CV-enriching email in from one of my clients.

A quote: “It is a wonderful opportunity to have made the acquaintance of such a brilliant photographer who has created for …….. an equally brilliant blog … the 30 something wordpress comments in my inbox this morning bear testimony to this!”……

It just made my day!!! Co-incidentally it’s also my Birthday 😀

I’m happy!!! So happy that I don’t add a picture to this post ….

Reflection in the Mist

Just saw the statistics of this blog: last night two mile stones the first being 40,000 views (excluding the bloggers who scan through the WordPress Reader) and 1000 likers!!!

And it was misty early this morning …

Me and social media; what about you?

There are ‘those’ who are sending continuously their ‘where-about’ and ‘personal experience’ messages into cyberspace via a multitude of social media like Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. I’m not a favourite of opening my ‘well-being’ or ‘not-so-well-being’ plus my ‘where-abouts’ to the whole world. I’m a bit of a cyberspace hermit in that regard but I do see the value of sharing my pictures with the world and if you can ‘read’ pictures and between text lines you might get a bit of a glimpse of me. And that is fine.

I must also admit that I am very lazy and lazy-ness in my case results in efficient use of social media. Every time I post in this blog it’s automatically shared on my Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and (only if I want to) Facebook accounts. I rarely check my Tumblr and LinkedIn accounts but it’s a nice ‘niche’ to have as well. Once or twice per week I add one of more pictures to my Flickr account and almost daily I schedule my Tweets 10 to 100 days ahead with SocialOomph (meaning that I schedule a link to a blogpost with one click of the mouse) resulting in 50 to 100 repeating tweets daily. I do this since the discovery of SocialOomph a few months ago and it resulted so far in 4- t0 5-hundred new followers without having to follow others myself…. 😉 Another nice tool is Begware (just google); the free account allows you to automate retweets of up to 20 followers. And if these start to retweet your tweets the ‘snowball’ slowly gets bigger and bigger.

The social medium most ‘intensively’ used by me is Facebook (although on FB I’m having a break until the beginning of January). And where I spend most time on FB is the ‘personal messages’ page where I and some FB-friends I personally know chat a bit every now and than). Bloggers/mutual followers on wordpress I also follow (also mutual) on FB are Leanne Cole, Andrew Harvard, Wendy McDonald, and Rabirius. A few of them also tweet.

HOWEVER I do have the feeling that more of my followers are on more social media than WordPress alone. Follow/like me on Twitter and FB and I will follow/like you. ‘Retweets’ do work on Twitter is my recent experience as do ‘likes’ on FB.

My Twitter account: @Greencathedral

My photography page on Facebook (abstract/surrealism): https://www.facebook.com/GreenCProductions (very recently started up next to my personal page)

My Flickr page is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/110355146@N05/

Hit the 25000 views milestone

… and that is excluding the countless views via the WordPress reader by other bloggers. Thank you all! And until so far (after a tiny bit more than 1 yr) 675 followers who faithfully follow my trials and errors. It’s not the quantity of the followers that count but the quality. I’m very, very happy. 🙂 🙂 🙂

For all of you a flower (Dutch always say it with flowers!), a Stanford sunrise and a sunset.

Today is also the day that the latest online edition of LandnSand Magazine published my photographic essay about landscape photography.

Thanks to all …

… as this blog just passed the 20000 visits mark. That is excluding the bloggers who read my submissions via the WordPress Reader.

Most of the visits are traced back to the Americas (>50%), South Africa and neighboring countries account for approx. 20 percent as does Europe. The rest is from where-ever!

Thank you all!

As Dutch (especially in South Africa) always say it with flowers here is a symbolic one for you all and it originates from the area I live in (Overberg region, Western Cape, South Africa):

The Favorit Imaginary

Time to evaluate the interest in my images and imaginaries since I started this blog 4 months ago. According to the WordPress statistics the imaginary ‘Romancing the flower’ is the absolute topper. It was one of the first postings and also one of my favorites; already designated for online poster sales later this year. The most favorite pictures are those of the recent fires that blazed around this village. Especially the helicopter with the bucket flying into the red as a David versus Goliath scored high. The next posting, BTW, is that of an imaginary of this helicopter. The third place goes to an imaginary of my first photo model; Karuna with a hat the queen of Holland is jealous of.

Back to ‘Romancing the Flower’. This imaginary consists of flower elements and Clarissa (one of the dolls of the Stanford Hotel) against a mixed background of the sunset and elements of nearby Papiesvlei (farm community). Added with a moon and ‘Brigitte the Butterfly’ of Fabrikk Gassenschau; a unique outdoor theatre spectacle in Switzerland.

With the WordPress statistics at hand I also realized that the number of ‘likes’ does not tell anything about the real interest. The likes are only from other WordPress users who are logged in. The real interest goes beyond that.

Dear WordPress…

Does anybody have a solution??? The support department of wordpress does not respond and their forums/support pages are not very helpful either in this regards…. This is the message I send to support@wordpress.com this morning and simular messages I’ve send during the past few weeks but without any reply….

Hi there,

Before I want to upgrade the blog https://elementaryposters.wordpress.com I should like to see that the problems I am experiencing with secure connections to the wordpress.com server are solved.
I am using a brand-new Apple iMac (MC812) with the latest version of Safari. It does not make any difference when I clear cookies and caches or add an ‘s’ to ‘http’; the problem: Safari is unable to establish a secure connection with the wordpress.com server. Until so far the solutions offered in your forums/support pages are not sufficient. In practice I have to ‘reload’ pages several times. Submitting a post is a hazard for the page does not always open in full and adding photographs …. tsjoo…. I’m sweating.

Please help!

(Thanks)

Herman