I went from 2.5 to 2.8.1
Testing the upgrade…
July 19th, 2009
How To Photograph Lightning
August 30th, 2008The past couple of days have been nothing short on electric activity here in the AZ desert. z
The monsoons are rolling through and thunder storms are abundant. So, I took it upon myself to go shoot some lightning. After a few people saw my images, a common question became: “How did you take that?!”
So, I thought I’d slap a little know-how down for anyone that happens to have the same question.
Step 1. Get the right tools – Have a camera capable of manual controls. Have a tripod. And have an area that isn’t riddled with light pollution. . . Don’t be like my dad and crawl up on top of your roof during a lightning storm with your electronic devices, metal tripod, and body that is 80% water… It tends to lead to bad things.
Step 2. Set your camera accordingly – Depending on your light situation, this may differ a little bit, so feel free to play with these settings. I tend to take a look at the frequency of the lightning bolts and decide how cluttered I want my images. If I want a lot of bolts in them, I shoot for shutter. Meaning, I set up for a 25″ or 30″ shutter speed. I then use an appropriate f-stop to make my pictures expose correctly (this is where the playing around comes in). I generally end up around f8-f10
I’ve also been known to take shorter duration pictures if I want to a) keep the bolts to singles b) have a light pollution problem c) make a time lapse movie like you see here.
Step 3. Compose for success – Take a look at where the lightning is striking down. You can generally get an idea for where the storm is headed. Compose your shot as if the lightning wasn’t even there… like you were just taking a normal landscape shot. Do this rather than chasing lightning around the sky. You’ll end up with much better photos, and a higher success rate.
Step 4. Click Click Click – That’s right… take LOTS of pictures. Lots and lots and lots… and then some more.
If everything is done correctly, you’ll end up with shots like this:
Lightning Storm
Superstition Springs Golf Course Under Attack!
Superstition Springs at "dusk"
Playing with my white balance a little gave me a great dusk look for the photo above. I set the white balance to “Fluorescent” to achieve the orange colored sky.
Compilation of strikes
$300 in 30 – Days 6,7,8 – Creating Good Habits
August 26th, 2008Well the past three days have been nothing short of long. I’ve been working my thumbs to the bone trying to come up with solid ways to make consistent money. Unfortunately, I should have probably been concentrating more on doing what had been working for me in the first place.
My daily income had been $33.00 on day 5 and has since dropped back to between $0 and $12.
Definitely not enough to live on.
Furthermore, I’ve been working MORE to EARN LESS. Not the way I want to structure this whole shin dig.
Needless to say, almost everything that I’ve been doing, I’d rather not even mention simply because it hasn’t proven to be effective… and I’d rather not dish out the bad advice.
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A word on productivity and self esteem
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About 3 days ago, I realized that my days aren’t even close to the level of productivity that I will need to achieve in order to maintain $300 per day.
So, in an effort to change things up a little, I figured out a little trick that has been helping me get the most done every day.
First, I want to start by saying that I’m a sucker for instant gratification (as are most people). So, I feel an overwhelming sense of joy when something pans out… but lately it feels as though there is never a “finish” point for me to feel good about achieving. No ending… it’s always work and when I’m done with what work I’m doing, I can count on there being more work. An endless supply of work, if you will.
So, how am I supposed to feel like I achieved anything if it’s never ending?
I had to come up with some separate goals to achieve.
Something that could be done within a matter of 10 minutes, so that I might satisfy my instant gratification craving.
So, I started doing 50 push ups in the morning.
What does 50 push ups have to do with making $300 per day? A LOT…
I’m not saying everyone should do 50 push ups and it’ll magically make you $300 per day. What I am saying is that by setting small goals for myself OUTSIDE of work, I’ve enabled myself to feel good about doing something for me and attaining that goal rather quickly.
This allows me to feel that burst of joy that I was talking about before, and that momentum creates a significant increase in the amount that I am able to accomplish.
The best days are the days when you just don’t feel like doing it (my today), but you do it anyway… You’ve overcome a motivational barrier then, and that should make you proud, which in turn will make you more motivated.
So, your task for today is to come up with 2 habits that you’d like to develop, that are good for you or change your lifestyle in a positive way. These habits should take you no longer than about 10 minutes to accomplish, and they should be something that you truly want.
I want nice pectoral muscles… I’ll admit it. So, I do push ups.
Find out what you want. It doesnt have to be small either. It can be a huge goal, but chop it up into 10 minute segments… then accomplish those mini goals every single day.
The momentum you’ll gain will be very helpful to the productivity that you’ll achieve during your day.
$300 in 30 – Days 4 & 5
August 22nd, 2008I didn’t update yesterday because, well, there wasn’t much to say. I ended up making a grand total of 33.22 from affiliate commissions on day 3 and yesterday I those commissions dropped back to 16.61. Bummer.
I suppose it doesn’t matter though, because I’ve found a system to make it work and I plan to keep on persevering.
In other news, I thought to myself, “If I’m driving traffic to other peoples products, why not drive them to my own”, so I spent the better part of yesterday writing an ebook on a subject that I know quite a bit about. I plan on pricing it in the 37-47 range so if I can maintain my one sale per day, per video, I should be able to double my money almost instantly.
It’s all theory now though.
As soon as I get a sure-fire system worked out, I’ll post here… until then it’ll be the same work over and over.
Make videos, point them to affiliate offers, make money. Rinse. Repeat. It really IS that simple.
$300 in 30 – Day 3 Money Making System 1
August 20th, 2008Okay, if you’ve been following along, I’ve set up my goal – to make $300 per day within the next 30 days – and taken the first step to achieving it.
Yesterday, I went through my brain and put together everything that I have an interest in, and everything that I’m good at. Then I analyzed it to see if anything was sell-able.
I came back with a few things like Photography, Photoshop, Videography, Design, etc.. all creative stuff really.
So, in an effort to get the ball rolling a little, I decided to post some classified ads on craigslist for some freelance work, and some design/photo retouch work.
Nothing…..
Not even an email response.
I can’t continue on like that, and needless to say, it doesn’t really fit my business model outlined in the prior post. It fails in the scalability department. But, I need some quick cash, so I’m reaching for anything that I can at this point.
Well, fast forward in my day a little and let’s talk about something that actually DID make me some money.
I’ve been dabbling in affiliate marketing for a long time now (about 8 months) and I’ve managed to make some decent money, but most of the time it’s the cost of doing the business that eats up all of the profit. So, I end up working hard, and getting very little out of it.
Yesterday though, I figured I’d just throw something out there and see what happened.
I’m kind of taking a “toss the spaghetti” approach to this until I find something repeatable that actually makes money. In case you’re scratching your head, I’m talking about the phrase “Toss the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks”.
So, I uploaded a video to youtube that I made, and had an affiliate offer in the description box… just to see what would happen.
Net profit: 16.61
That means that on day 2 of this little experiment, I’ve already created a positive income of 16.61. The best part about this is that I spent absolutely zero money on marketing the product. The entire process took me about an hour and I “set it and forget it”.
Chances are good that this little gem will make me trickles of $16.61 income for the next who-knows-how-long.
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So, let’s analyze the data.
Without posting the video for you to see, I’ll just go through some of the numbers. My reasoning for not posting the video is that I’d like to be able to track my conversion rates of a completely natural experiment until I get a little better baseline for comparison. If I posted the video, the views would go up, and the sales might not. I want as REALISTIC results as I can get… so you’ll get to see it later.
The video has had a total of 59 views. Views are unique visitors (meaning if someone watches it more than once, it only counts as 1). With my fancy shmancy little google analytics account (free for anyone, sign up at google.com), I can see that of those 59 people, 10 of them clicked through my link in the description, and of those 10, 1 person bought the offer.
That gives us a CTR (click through rate) of 16.9% and a conversion rate of 10% (people that saw the offer vs. people that bought the offer). Or, if you’d like to nitpick,
Now, a dabble in theoretics…
Let’s say that I create one of these bad boys per day. Just one. That’s equal to one hour of my time per day to make 16 bucks.
Now, let’s assume that this trend continues and this video makes 1 sale per day (like i hope it will, haha).
The numbers look like this:
Day 1 – 0; Day 2 – $16; Day 3 – $32; Day 4 – $48; and so forth..
How long does it take me to make a video per day?
1 hour.
How long does it take me to maintain these videos?
Zero time.
This fits my business model.
This is one of my plans now.
Obviously I don’t want to look like a fool and fail at this, so I’ll be doing a few other things alongside the video plan, and at the end of the 30 days, I’ll invest my full time into one plan of action and FOCUS.
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Update:
I learned a valuable lesson today. The more you can do in the morning, the more you get done during the day.
You see, I made some more videos, along with creating some other stuff and playing with some new ideas… but I have yet to see any benefit from them because, well, I just finished them. Had I put my mind to it and finished them this morning, they would have had all day to pull in results for me.
I’ll have an income status for you tomorrow. For now, though, I’m signing off.
$300 in 30 – Day 2, Creating Systems
August 19th, 2008So, yesterday I didn’t actually make any money, which was to be expected. I did however create some systems.
I also figured that it would be good to create some sort of format for this thing so that anyone following along could read my plan for the day, and the result of that day.
Rather than posting twice a day, I figure that I will edit each post at the end of the day to tell a little about my results. My main reason is just plain readability. This will enable people to get the whole story in just one blog post and thus follow along a little more closely.
So, what’s on the docket for day 2? More planning… I suppose.
You see, I haven’t really thought this whole thing through. I just jumped in an said, I need to make $300 bucks a day within the next 30 days or I’m screwed. So, that’s what I’m going to do.
In order to make $300 per day happen, there is going to have to be some rules though. I can’t very well be running around selling all of my belongings, even if that would get me to $300 a day, because eventually that revenue stream will dry up. So:
1. It has to be repeatable.
Also, I am going to have to be able to make the absolute most out of my day if I plan on working anything less than 20 hours a day. I’m not afraid of hard work, trust me, I’ve been working about 20 hours a day for the past 4 months now… it’s just not making me any money. All of this, plus I don’t really want to become a slave to this (as if I’m not already) once I’m in a position to start delegating tasks to other people. So:
2. It has to be able to be done remotely.
And
3. It must be scalable.
A word on “scalable”. Scalable to me means that I must be able to get myself out of my own way eventually. Meaning that at one point I need to be able to either outsource everything, or hire people to take my place. These people need to be expendable and easily replaced. Essentially, I need a business that will still succeed, even with dumb people at the helm.
Now that we’ve narrowed it down a little (or lot), what the heck am I going to do?
That’s what today is about.
Finding my talents, and applying them to my business “model”
To-Do List for today:
- Analysis of my talents
- Research into each idea
- Easy application – test the ideas
General idea for today: do “little” but do it very well.
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Update:
I didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday. A lot of it was all planning and analyzing my interests. I came up with a list of about 10 things that I can do very well that would be sell-able assets. Things like photography, photoshop, design, building websites, etc…
The only problem now is that those areas seem to have a huge competition for market share. I’m still going to have to noodle on this for a while.
300 in 30 – Earning $300 A Day Within 30 Days
August 18th, 2008That’s right. That’s my new goal.
I’ve been doing some looking around my wallet, and it’s pretty damn empty. I mean baron. Tumbleweeds and all…
I’ve also done some debt analysis and come to the conclusion that if I don’t come up with some SERIOUSLY proactive solutions, I’m never going to get out of debt.
So, I set up a time line, and it just so happens that if I want to meet my time line, I need to make $241.23 per day over the course of that time line. That sounds a whole lot harder than I think it’s going to be though.. so I upped the anti to an even $300/per day.
At $300 a day, I will average around $9000.00 / per month, or $108,000 / per year.
In case you’re punching that into your calculator, yes. I plan on making $300.00 EVERY DAY.
How Do I plan on making this happen? Any way that I can possibly think to do it. For starters, I’ll be creating products, doing photography, painting houses, and cutting lawns if i have to. Literally anything that I can do to make decent money will be done. Well, anything legal.
So, stay tuned into this because I’ll be tracking most of my progress throughout this blog.
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Update:
Well it’s 9:58 PM now and I managed to make absolutely zero dollars today.
That’s okay thought because I’ve created a few systems that will make me money later on. It’s obviously going to take me a little time to ramp this up. I was hoping to make at least something today though.
Better luck tomorrow I suppose.
Big Foot FOUND!?! What in the Yeti?
August 15th, 2008Wow… Supposedly a couple boys from Georgia found Big Foot..
bigfoot
No, not the monster truck. I’m talking about a real, live (er.. dead), sasquatch. Something that you see in all of the discovery channel mystery shows.
This creature has been nothing short of illusive for the better half of the last decade (probably longer than that). But at last, someone found a dead one.
What’s more? Supposedly, on their hike out with this massive 500 lb beast, they spotted several more of them observing.
As reported on SearchingForBigfoot.com, the beast(?) is 7′7″ tall and has massive appendages along with a body weight in excess of 500 lbs.
There was a live press conference on CNN earlier this afternoon, however the Atlanta Journal stated that it failed to “to shock world.” Bummer I missed it.
Many well known and credible resources are backing this discovery (Discovery Channel, CNN, , although not confirming that it is actually “Big Foot” but saying that the discovery is indeed strange.
Scientists are scheduled to perform tests, and the results will be released to the world…
In the mean time, I suppose it will just have to hang out in the freezer, which is where it’s been for almost 2 months now.
OH THE SMELL!!!
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While we’re here, can I just express my discontent at the fact that they’ll be attempting to catch one of these things live?
Can’t people just leave well enough alone?
When that poor thing gets caught, it’ll be subjected to all kinds of needles, syringes, shocks, and a cage the size of my spare bedroom… kinda sad really.
Free Will – Do We Have It?
August 14th, 2008No, not Willy the Orca Whale… but will, as in the ability to choose one’s destiny? Maybe that’s not how I should explain it.. who knows.
Without getting into the question at hand too deeply, I wanted to bring up a blog I found today. I was caught off guard by a twitter post from one of the people that I follow, Rachel Rofe. Rachel has an interesting little tid bit on her blog about free will, and I have to say, it made me think about my ability to make choices and what I can be, or not be; who I am; where I’m going; and my ability make life what I want it.
Have a look at Rachel’s blog for more comments on the subject.
Random Acts Of Kindness
August 14th, 2008Today I asked for help.
And while that may not sound like anything out of the ordinary to anyone, it was a little out of my comfort zone.
To my surprise, however, there was an overwhelming response to my problem and I’m hoping to have a solution soon.
There was one person, who I can’t name because I’m sworn to secrecy, that did something that was totally unexpected. Something that they didn’t have to do at all, and quite frankly, something that I would have never expected anyone to do.
The cool part about what that person did, was that it wasn’t a hand out. I’m definitely going to have to earn “it”, but they gave me the tools that I needed to make something happen.
It’s a classic case of ‘give a man a fish/teach a man to fish’… and I’m really glad to be on the teach side.