I’m most certainly not in the first group and probably see-saw between the other two. I like photography and I like taking photos but when it comes to the final shot it’s mainly luck when I end up with a decent photo. So I’m been trying to think of ways to improve and do so slowly rather than try and use filters as an instant fix.

Yesterday I used the sun as an excuse to go for a bit of a walk with my camera and see if I could get some nice shots. This is one of the results:

One of my big issues with my photos compared to pro shots always seems to be colour. I know a lot of professional photos these days are touched up and developed to improve the colour to make them more dramatic. When I’ve attempted this I usually go too far, I haven’t got the eye for knowing when enough is enough yet.

So unless the photo is naturally rich in colour I think I’m going to stick with black and white for a while. I’m hoping it will allow me to concentrate more on the subject of the photo.

It’s for this reason why I’m going to limit myself to only uploading one photo at a time. I’ve seen other people do this to great effect. Usually I’ll upload a group of photos from a particular trip and use Flickr as online storage rather than a portfolio. So I’ll upload multiple similar shots devaluing the impact of them singularly. By limiting myself I can concentrate on quality over quantity.

Rethinking how I use Flickr by Kean Richmond

Though the escapades of Think Vis 5 will always be hard to beat this certainly comes in a close second for me. Ideas such a bouncy castle in a casino and Chewbacca (of Star Wars fame) speaking about anchor text can only come from the ever so slightly twisted mind of Dominic Hodgson, or at the very least he’s the only man with the balls to ever go through with it.

Something different

But this year was always going to be a little different for me as this year I was one of the lucky few to get my face on some pick ‘n’ mix (Rhubarb and Custard btw). If you don’t know what this means, it means I was one of the speakers.

I got asked a few times why I’d decided to do it and the most useful answer was I just had to see if I could do it. I look at other people presenting and think it’s a nice way to be recognised by your peers and so I thought I should put myself outside of my comfort zone and give it a go.

The Presentation

Here’s the actual presentation I did, and it’s a little useless on its own. But luckily it’s based on this article, which got remixed into this infographic.

If these together still leave some blanks then tweet or email me and I’d be happy to try and fill some in.

I bit of drowning does us good, right?

Before I presented I was worried I wasn’t more terrified. I had my presentation done, I knew what I was going to say and had some notes just in case. Everything went fine till I turned on the microphone and suddenly bottled it, got nervous and forgot most of what I wanted to say.
Notes became things to shuffle while trying to get my brain in order, water was another useful distraction as well as a necessary addition otherwise I’d not have lasted. But in the end I survived and got through it.

I know it wasn’t slick; I’d have been a fool to think it would have been. I paused too much, forgot to say certain things and over elaborated on others. I dropped some jokey bits as I knew they’d have to be played with more confidence to get the right reaction. Some of the things I did include were a little hit and miss too so I was best to avoid trying too hard.

When talking to people afterwards it seemed people easily picked up on my nerves but said I did settle down after a while so that’s good. Other comments included a lack of examples in places and a little too much explaining what I was going to talk about rather than just doing it. I think this is possible a case of me trying to over justify the reason for talking about design in an SEO conference.

But it’s the day after now and all in I’m glad I did it. As they say it’s better to try and fail (which I don’t think I did) then to not try at all.

Would I do it again though? I’d love to be able to do it better and without the nerves but I could try 100 times and possibly never get to that point. Let’s just say given the opportunity and the right topic I’d probably give it another shot.

Thanks

I should also thank the people that turned up to the session, I expected it might be a fairly low turnout but there were more than I expected, and of course I had @douglasradburn, @juliankay and a few others quietly sat in the front row for friendly moral support.

Also big thanks to @carla_marshall, it’s weird but I kept seeing her nod along though the talk which really helped.

The After party

I have to quickly mention the after party. Between learning I can’t drive race cars drunk, playing in a bouncy castle ball pit and trying my best to win the poker tournament it was loads of fun. Made even better by the company of @stuSEOlong and @joe_griffiths2 from branded3 (though different things I seem to be slowly meeting and collecting branded3 people).

My only disappointment is that on returning for a second go in the bouncy castle it was already closed. But returning to the frankly beautiful hotel room I got for being a speaker made up for it.

Questions?

If anyone saw the talk or has looked through the presentation above and has any questions feel free to contact me either here or through twitter.

From the other side by Kean Richmond

To be honest the design isn’t my favourite, which I know it should be given that this is my site and should reflect the best of my ability. That said however, I had changes I really wanted to make to the site and really not enough time to get everything 100% right.

The reasons for the update were ideally to bring in a few newer bits of information like my Dribbble feed and also highlight the guest articles I do for Onextrapixel and Six Revisions. Also while redeveloping the site it had to be built in HTML5 and be made responsive given these are the new buzzwords of the industry and something not found in the last version of this site.

Part of me still thinks this is a bad idea given the reception the previous design got, the highlight being featured in Smashing Book 2. As to not bin it completely I do link to a imager of the design from the homepage and also here. I considered creating a 2010.keanrichmond.com so the code remained also but frankly the amount of work involved in doing that goes against the idea of doing this all quickly. Quick is an even greater concern as I have a presentation to get created as well as a few other niceities in the pipeline

One thing to mention is this is wildly under tested and under optimised but I thought I could fix those once live. Also I’m frankly ignore anything lower than IE8 because they’re old and no one coming to my site for anything it actually offers should be using old browsers.

So enjoy, feel free to leave comments or bugs and when I get the itch to redesign again hopefully I’ll have loads of time to really come up with something that’s a new level of awesomeness.

Something new for 2012 by Kean Richmond

The reason I say lost my mind has nothing to do with the conference itself more my aversion to public speaking or almost anything that draws attention which could then be negative. But hell it’s 2012 I’m apparently considered a grown up so I’m sure I can spend 45 minutes of my life trying something new and scary.

So with that in mind if you’re free on the 3rd of March and have a slightly odd interest in a design based talk at what is primarily an SEO conference with some extra stuff thrown in then please come along. I’m sure my talk will either be informative or entertaining (in you’ll see me crumble on stage), hell I might even manage both

What was I thinking? by Kean Richmond