Monthly Archives: March 2008

Fulfilling the Photography Dream

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My long cherished dream of learning photography seems to be on track. After much thought and deliberation, I have finally managed to get on to the SLR ladder, through an entry level Sony Alpha 200. Last Sunday, I finally walked into an Argos store and picked up the camera, which kits out with a 18mm-70mm lens. As of now, I have no plans to invest in any accessories, lens or filters, other than the minimum necessities of a Compact Flash card and a carry case.

I haven’t really had an opportunity to explore the Camera as I am still expecting delivery of the memory card from Play.com. However, the first impressions of the camera are outstanding. Complete technical specifications of the camera are listed on the Sony website here. In the past, I had been advised by a couple of friends that I should go for a Canon EOS 400D. But I have always had an inclination to Sony cameras as I have previously owned a Sony T5 Compact. Sony is a new entrant in the SLR market and they have had a fair bit of success with their Alpha range (Ever since they launched the Alpha 100, I had always contemplated buying one). Also, since their acquisition of the Camera & Photo division from Minolta in 2006, the SLR market is braced up for a slew of Sony Cameras.

In 2006, Sony announced their entry to the SLR market through the Konica-Minolta based Alpha 100. At that point of time the camera, though affordable for entry level photography, was a bit out of my budget (I vaguely remember it’s price in the £600 bracket). Subsequently, the company introduced Alpha 700 for advanced photography. In February 2008, Sony announced the extension of their Alpha range by introducing the Alpha 200 & Alpha 350. Alpha 200 is a slighlty modified version of an Alpha 100 and has had favourable reviews.

Considering that am off to Paris, Amsterdam and Athens this Saturday for the big Easter Weekend…it is an ideal time to brush up my basics in photography, before I take it to the next level. Expect to see some good pictures from my trip here…

Mysterious PR Drop!

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PageRankThe sudden drop in PR for Arena Flowers from 5 to 3 has been really frustrating and disappointing. Over the last few months quality links has been the buzzword and to that effect, we have been trying to squeeze out editorially vouched links for the site from related domains. At Arena Flowers, we are really proud of our SEO activities. But the anomalistic (it is indeed) drop in PR has got us racking our brains trying to point the drop to a certain differentiator. What’s more annoying is the drop in all the internal pages. We have about 100, 000 pages indexed in Google of which at least 25 % of them had decent PR and none of them have green liquid anymore. The real disappointment is to see our blog have no PR. Flowers…Uncut is widely followed and we have got so much of appreciation for our site through the blog. We also have hundreds of quality incoming links to the blog. To see the blog have no PR value is a bit disconcerting.

ArenaFlowers.com PageRankWe have scoured the Internet and scouted all the SEO blogs and forums and even had an opinion from a global expert in the industry, without success. SEO experts argue that PR is in no way related to SERPs and traffic and makes little sense to websites, unless the sites are based on selling links. But we see PR as an indicator of our SEO performance apart from the other variables like ranking high on SERPs, traffic etc. Post PR drop, traffic is unaffected and SERPs for competitive keywords have not had any impact. However, the little green bar though irritating, does offer some satisfaction when it is a bit longer than it was previously.

It will be a real bonus if we get to the bottom of our mysterious PR drop on the home page as well as the internal pages. I contemplated posting a query on Matt Cutt’s blog, but decided against it as I feel it would be futile. There are millions of websites and even if 10 % of these websites start querying their site problems with Matt, then he would have to quit his regular job at Google.

It’s all back to square one…wonder how long it takes to be back again!