Brenternet (The World as seen by Brent Moore)

Trying to appeal to the highest common denominator. I can't give you 110% effort, but I will give you 107.4% effort. If you're a spammer and leave me a comment, I will make fun of you. I use twice as many semicolons compared to most other bloggers

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Location: Smyrna, Tennessee, United States

As the title implies, I am Brent K. Moore. I married MariLynn Simons on Sept. 25, 1999. we attend Stewart's Creek Church of Christ. We have five pets, a dachshund, Slinkie, a malamute, Juno, and three rabbits, Ebunny and Ifurry, and now Houdini.

Thursday, January 02, 2020

Brent's 2019 Self-Aggrandizement Photography Post

Back with probably no demand whatsoever, it has become my yearly tradition early in the year to look back at all of my photos and crunch the numbers to see how everything did. In years past, I've written all the boring stat stuff first. This year, I'll show the year's top photos first and then you can skip over the boring numbers at the end.

Brent's top 10 favorite photos of 2019:

My favorite photos aren't necessarily my best photos, but they usually have some significance to me.

Gravesite of President Andrew Jackson
1) Gravesite of President Andrew Jackson

There are many, many places I have photographed in Nashville, but until this year, the Hermitage was not one of them. I'm not really a fan of going to historic mansions because you're not allowed to take pictures on the inside. They do offer a free day every year on Jan. 8 (which is coming up real soon) and the weather was perfect. The mansion itself is not very photogenic. There were two places on the grounds I did want to see. 1) Rachel's church, because I went with my dad when his group performed there in the late 1980s. 2) Jackson's gravesite, shown here. I like how they added the decorative bunting on this day.

Some people have a life goal to visit the burial sites of all U.S. Presidents. Maybe I'll go for that someday. Including Jackson, I have photographed 4, plus visited three others on a school field trip in 8th grade.

Capt. Jeff Kuss USMC Memorial (1) - Smyrna, TN
2) Capt. Jeff Kuss USMC Memorial - Smyrna, TN

Sometimes, it's hard for me to find the time to photograph the things closest to home. In January, I found the time, and had the opportunity to do it right. This is the memorial to Jeff Kuss, the Blue Angels pilot who crashed about a mile from my house.

Pine Cove Motel - Nashville, TN
3) Pine Cove Motel - Nashville, TN

I like old neon signs and they don't come rustier and crustier than this one.

Nashville National Cemetery
4) Nashville National Cemetery

I was visiting this cemetery and at this spot, it just hit me how beautiful the place was. This was also one of my photos to reach Flickr's explore this year. Explore is the top 500 photos uploaded each day.

Burial Site of Gov. William Carroll
5) Burial Site of Gov. William Carroll

Another quest of mine is to find the burial site of every Tennessee Governor and I have visited 17 so far. Gov. Carroll is buried at Nashville's City Cemetery. Right after I took this photo, a gentleman who was on the board of directors of the cemetery asked me if I was looking for anyone in particular. (I suppose I have that look of a history enthusiast.) When I'd mentioned how Gov. Carroll was on my "to do" list, he mentioned he was a descendant of Gov. Carroll. From there, he offered to give me a personal tour. He showed me the other gravesites I was aware of, including Gen. William Driver, Mayor Ben West, and Suicide Rock. But he also showed me places I was not aware of, such as the original burial site of President Polk, which wasn't marked until 2014, and a Cenotaph to Gov. John Sevier.

Cassano's Pizza King neon sign
6) Cassano's Pizza King neon sign

For Spring Break, my wife and I took a trip to Cincinnati. I finally had a chance to visit the American Sign museum. This is a photo of a neon sign in that museum. Cassano's is a chain of Pizza restaurants in Ohio. Somehow, this photo managed to become my all-time most viewed photo and third-most Favorited. It was also my second photo to reach Flickr's explore.


Cincinnati Union Terminal
7) Cincinnati Union Terminal

On the same trip, the weather was perfect when I had the chance to stop at this iconic local landmark.

Hancock Co. Courthouse with fall Tobacco display - Sneedville, TN
8) Hancock Co. Courthouse - Sneedville, TN

I have been on multiple Photo quests over the last decade. Perhaps the most important to me was being able visit every Tennessee County Courthouse. There are 95 Tennessee counties, and the Hancock County Courthouse in Sneedville was number 95, for me to complete this quest. Someone once suggested I turn all of these into a poster, and I started a series of post cards for sale a few years ago. A friend asked me what the claim to fame for Sneedville is. My best answer is it's a city where you would go through accidentally; It's remote and you'd be going there on purpose.

TN/VA/KY Tri-point
9) TN/VA/KY Tri-point

Visiting the Sneedville courthouse was part of a larger trip to Cumberland Gap. I had been plotting this trip for years and finally had the chance to go with my wife during Fall Break. There were multiple places to see along this trip so there wasn't really one which stood out above the rest. Just having a chance to go was a dream for me. However, this specific spot was an extra accomplishment. I'm older and in worse shape than I used to be, so going on a 2.5 mile round trip hike is not something that I do as often as I used to. Getting to the spot where three states was an accomplishment I can be proud of. It was something my wife and I were able to do together, even if we spent the whole time wondering how much further we had to go.

Elrod Falls
10) Elrod Falls

While my wife and I don't get to go hiking as much as we used to, we also don't get to see as many waterfalls. This one was a nice place to stop at the end of our fall break trip.


I had ten photos make Flickr's Explore this year, some of them were taken in previous years but uploaded this year. Two of the ten were already discussed earlier, so here are the rest. It seems like it's never the ones I think would be the best which make it. Flickr has fewer active users than it used to, which means I made the cut more often.

Old Courthouse Columns - New Albany, IN
This photo from 2017 are the old courthouse columns in New Albany, Indiana.

Maplesville, AL train depot
Train station in Maplesville, AL - also taken in 2017.

Jefferson Island Salt faded ad - Andalusia, AL
Faded vintage wall ad for Jefferson Island Salt. Located in Andalusia, AL and also taken in 2017.

Sam's Ice Cream & Candy - Covington, KY
On the trip to Cincinnati, we saw the old neon sign for Sam's Ice Cream across the river in Covington, KY.

Hank Snow's Rainbow Ranch - Nashville, TN
Country Music star Hank Snow had a house in East Nashville. If you look closely, there is a barn in the backyard which was his Rainbow Ranch recording studio. This property was added to the National Register of Historic Places recently.

Richmond, TX Train Station
My wife and I also took a trip to Houston this year. This is the old train station in the nearby town of Richmond.

Weidmann's neon sign - Meridian, MS
On the way home from Houston, we saw this sign for Weidmann's Restaurant in the town of Meridian, MS.

May a Horse be With You
Finally, near the home of the Walking Horse championship is this mural which plays off the famous saying from Star Wars.

Other 2019 accomplishments:

I sold two photos this year. It was ironic how similar the photos were. Both photos were taken while I was a passenger in a moving car when we went to visit my brother in Atlanta for Thanksgiving. Both photos were pictures of buildings which had new owners in 2019 and the new owner wanted my image of their building on display inside the building.

There is a website which lets you track how many counties in America you have visited. Someday, I'd like to visit every county in America, but at the end of 2018, I have been to 572 counties, which makes up 18.20% of America. This year I completed Tennessee and it was the first time I've been to Louisiana. In total, I visited 43 new counties from KY, MS, OH, SC, TX & VA this year.

Now that the best photos are out of the way, what can Brent bore everyone with?

This may be the part where you stop reading. I am a professional number cruncher, so this kind of thing is my cup of tea and probably not yours. I record it for posterity sake.

In 2019, I took more than 20,000 photos. About 19,000 were of my son. (Not really.)

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to Flickr. I now have a total of 10,315 of which about 360 were uploaded in 2019. These photos have been viewed collectively 14,519,463 times. During 2013, Flickr changed what's considered a "view" making more things count than what used to. As a number cruncher, this irritates me, so 1.6 million views in 2019 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,000 views.) My All-time most viewed photo came this year. It's the Cassano's Pizza King photo above with 74,551 views.

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. My webhost's stats show last year I had 18,955 unique visitors who made 37,363 visits viewing a total of 129,325 page views with 491,814 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 11.95 GB of bandwidth. 43.7% of visitors are Mac users which for the first time was larger than the Windows users. 55.2% people browsed with Chrome and 5 people used a browser called Epiphany (I've never heard of it), which is more than MS Edge. I set up a Facebook account which now has 108 followers and a twitter feed with 81 followers. These were set up as a set-it-and-forget-it tools that re-post my other content, but still has room for growth.

In 2015, I set up a Pinterest page where I re-post my popular Flickr photos. I also have a couple of boards where I pin my favorite photos taken by others, so this is going to skew the data of my original content. Pinterest tells me I have 1073 pins on 15 boards. My most popular pin was the I.W.P. Buchanan house in Lebanon, TN with its fantastic Victorian architecture. I don't fully understand Pinterest stats but they tell me I now average 23,070 monthly viewers with 31,510 impressions while 737 users are engaged with 1,190 engagements.

The highlight of my website is the daily blog. Although in mid 2017 my day job started to take too much of my time and I no longer am able to update it. Blogger.com's count of page views reports I had 360,850 page views in 10 years at the end of 2019, but the counter appears broken now. I wish I could find the page where Google lists the searches people typed in to find me. Mostly, so I could look at the weird ones. once a person typed in "olive pit allergy" to get to my site.

I also have a YouTube channel. Most of my good videos are recordings of my dad's early music groups. All-time, I have 688,100 views with about 21,600 in 2019. A new stat they offer: In 2019, My videos have been watched for 431.6 hours, making an all-time total of 4400 hours. The most watched video is a recording of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" recorded at my Dad's Retirement Concert in 2007 with 36,900 views.

This year, I'm adding info about MariLynn's youtube channel, which blows mine away. Especially since she gets enough views to have ads in her videos. She has a lot of fun with her Tarantulas on it. As of the end of 2019, she has 3397 subscribers, a gain of 125 in 2018! She has 616,200 views for a total of 46,400 hours.

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