Brent's 2020 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.

2020 accomplishments:
I sold a photo to be aired on Quibi on a British TV show.

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 2020, I have been to 584 counties, which makes up 18.58% of America. In limited travel this year, I visited 12 new counties this year. Most were in Georgia, but a couple were in South Carolina.

Flickr says this rusty and crusty neon sign was my most interesting photo from 2020:


Other Favorites:





My Wife and I spent the night in this "fun to be Retro" hotel. See a slideshow video of the experience here.



The next night, my wife and I spent the night in this old hotel which is claimed to be haunted. I talk about our experience in this video slideshow.

Other videos this year include:
A Trip on the Benton Houston Ferry
A tour of the sinkholes at Sharp Springs Park
The Frank Sutton (Sgt. Carter) statue
We found a Mystery Bottle!


In 2020, I took more than 8700 photos. That sounds like a lot, but I average about 20,000 a year.

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to Flickr. I now have a total of 10,624 of which about 310 were uploaded in 2020. These photos have been viewed collectively 15,619,855 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 1.1 million views in 2020 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,000 views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. My webhost's stats show last year I had 20,285 unique visitors who made 34,450 visits viewing a total of 112,828 page views with 490,560 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 14.56 GB of bandwidth. 42.3% of visitors are Mac users which is barely more than the Windows users. 51.7% people browsed with Chrome and 2 people used a browser called Konqueror (I've never heard of it), which is still more than MS Edge. I set up a Facebook account which now has 119 followers and a twitter feed with 77 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. In 2020, I also created a board which will re-post all content from my blog. Pinterest tells me in 2020 I had 464,400 impressions, an audience of 313,700, 18,300 engagements and an engaged audience of 11,600. I have (unknown) pins on 16 boards. My most popular pin was the Statue of Justice at the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis. 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. In mid 2017 my day job started to take too much of my time and I no stopped posting. However, in 2020 with the extra time at home, I added new content again. Blogger.com's count of page views reports I had 387,703 page views spanning 2,695 posts in 11 years at the end of 2020, with 27,000 views in 2020. 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 top viewed videos are recordings of my dad's early music groups. However, in 2020 with the extra free time, I made various new content. Some of the videos were based on SeeMidTN content, I also had unrelated content of baseball cards, coins, and mystery box unboxings. All-time, I have 726,037 views with about 38,000 in 2000. A new stat they offer: In 2020, My videos have been watched for 1700 hours, making an all-time total of 6108 hours, or not quite half-way for monetization eligibility. The most watched video of all-time is a recording of "Salvation has Been Brought Down" at the 2011 Diana Singing with 40,000 views. My most-watched video recorded in 2020 was an unboxing of mystery silver coins purchased off ebay, with 2,694 hours

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 2020, she has 3435 subscribers. She has 661,200 views for a total of 49,600 hours.

50 Weird things I've seen in Tennessee

Here are 50 unusual things I have seen in Tennessee.  For fun, I'm not sharing the context of any of these locations in the slideshow.  If you want to learn more, check out this link which will include every photo and more:

https://www.flickr.com/groups/weirdtennessee/pool/brent_nashville

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.


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.


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.


3) Pine Cove Motel - Nashville, TN

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


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.


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.


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.



7) Cincinnati Union Terminal

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


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.


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.


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.


This photo from 2017 are the old courthouse columns in New Albany, Indiana.


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


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


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


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.


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


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


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.

Brent's 2018 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 2018:

There are several reasons why I might include a photo here. Some of the photos may look they don't belong in a "best of the year" post, but they may be important to me for other reasons. Some of these are my favorite composed shots of my favorite subjects. Some of these are interesting effects while overcoming challenges to get a usable photo. Here we go in no particular order:


1) Bartholomew County Courthouse (North Side) - Columbus, IN

In 2018, I had noticeably fewer opportunities to go on photo taking day trips. Many of these photos are taken on a couple of the business trips I went on during the year.

The bigger business trip was for a conference in Indianapolis. On the drive there, I visited several small towns in southern Indiana. While I was walking this small town, I heard someone calling my name. It turns out that Charlie, who goes to church with me, also was on a business trip. He was eating dinner outside and I walked right past him.


2) Jesse Owens Olympic Champion Statue

Jesse Owens was the hero of the 1936 Olympics. There is a museum in his honor near where he grew up in the middle of nowhere in Alabama. The museum is a nice place, and this statue was the highlight for me. The lady who operated the museum must not get many visitors and kept making conversation, probably hoping that I wouldn't leave.

When I told my mom about visiting this museum, she mentioned that my grandfather, who died when I was 4, was also a big fan of Jesse Owens. My grandfather was also a competitive jogger in Dallas.


3) Central of Georgia #223 Steam Locomotive

My wife and I went on vacation to Savannah, GA. I like trains and my wife loves steam trains. On the day we were there, they were supposed to have their train run that day. However, the property had just been used by a Hollywood Movie and they couldn't run the trains on this day. We were both disappointed. Instead, we took the roundhouse tour and got a good look at this beauty. I like the colors and tones in this photo even though there was no direct sunlight.


4) Washington County Courthouse - Springfield, KY

On the way to a business trip in Louisville, I stopped by several small towns in Kentucky. With a little daylight left, I went to Springfield with no notes on what to look for. I had passed through this town back in 2006 when I was a photography novice. Back then, this building was the town Courthouse. Now, a new courthouse opened across the street and this building is now a Lincoln Museum.

I love the way the sun hits the front of this building with the storm clouds in the background. I'm using a 10mm wide angle lens and am close as I can get.


5) Cockspur Island Lighthouse at Sunset

When my wife and I went to Savannah, we also took a Tybee Island Dolphin Cruise. For the sunset cruise, they get close to the old Cockspur Island Lighthouse around sunset.


6) Churchill Downs Race: Coming down the home stretch

My business trip to Louisville was held at Churchill Downs, after a day of lectures, we were treated to a night of races. While most of the other attendees were interested in wagering, I was interested in getting action photos. As it turns out, it is no trouble at all to get right up to the track on the ground level, probably because that's far from wagering and comforts. This was quite a soggy day, but the sun was out for this one race.


7) Indianapolis Motor Speedway Gate 1

My trip to Indy just happened to be the week of the Indianapolis 500. Race cars were everywhere, including our hotel. Downtown was quite festive as I walked about. On the Thursday before the race, I actually ventured out to the Speedway. I'm not an auto racing fan, but my mother-in-law is. I was hoping to see some sort of action, but there was none. I did like this photo of the entrance gate.


8) Hot Wheels Legends Tour Nashville: 1950 Mercury Diablo

The people who make Hot Wheels sponsored a series of car shows all around the country where the winner would have their car turned into a toy car. They had a stop in Nashville, and I liked the look of this Merc.


9) Skateland - Memphis, TN

Every so often I find something fantastic that wasn't on my list. This massive neon sign is one of them.

I was passing through Memphis on my way to something else when I was getting hungry. I considered eating at the Panchos here - just as my family used to do quite often as we would pass through town. But I was in a hurry and looking for something quicker.

My GPS told me to take White Station Rd. to get to my next destination. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a massive neon sign, but didn't get a good look at it. All I really saw were two red wings, so my first thought was it was a large neon Pegasus like the one which my dad told me lit up the Dallas skyline when he was a kid.


10) See 7 States from Rock City

My first love in Photography was finding all of the remaining Rock City barns. I was inspired to do this with a book I found in their gift shop around 2004. In the years since then, I've been able to get in contact with the creator of the book and my photographic inspiration. On my trip to Indiana, I've been able to add another three to my total, which now stands at 90. Half of the barns in his book from 1996 are now gone. Many of the ones which remain are faded and tough to read like this one. We had a phone call a couple months after this photo was taken.

If I remember correctly, The first Rock City barn he ever photographed, also in Indiana, fell down a couple of years ago. I still visited and photographed it anyway, even though it is a collapsed pile of wood. I guess I've seen 91.

I had three photos make Flickr's Explore, which is one of the top photos posted to the site each day. It seems like it's never the ones I think should be tops.


Panama City Publishing Co.


Hancock County Courthouse - Hawesville, KY


Southern Kitchen Restaurant - New Market, VA

Other 2017 accomplishments:

I had a couple of published photos this year. My photo of the controversial N.B. Forrest photo along I-65 in Brentwood seems to show up somewhere every year. This year, that photo, along with a photo of a waterfall inside Opryland Hotel appears in the new book "Secret Nashville" by Mason Douglas.

Also, my photo of the Town Clock Church in New Albany, IN appeared in the May 2018 issue of Indiana Preservation Magazine.



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 529 counties, which makes up 16.84% of America. I visited 32 new counties from GA, IN, KY & AL 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 2018, I took more than 17,800 photos. About 16,000 were of my son. (Not really.)

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to flickr. I now have a total of 9,947 of which about 300 were uploaded in 2018. These photos have been viewed collectively 12,891,420 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 1.2 million views in 2018 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,000 views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. My webhost's stats show last year I had 21,214 unique visitors who made 47,900 visits viewing a total of 129,008 page views with 438,594 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 12.92 GB of bandwidth. 41.3% of visitors used Windows which is going down a little every year. 47.8% people browsed with Chrome and 2 people used the older Opera, which is more than MS Edge. I set up a Facebook account which now has 103 followers and a twitter feed with 79 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 which for the most part pins 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 1002 pins on 15 boards. My most popular pin was the Acme Feed & Seed neon sign. I don't fully understang Pinterest stats but they tell me I now average 16,942 monthly viewers with 443 are engaged.

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 325,927 page views in 8 years at the end of 2017, 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 669,400 views with about 15,000 in 2018. A new stat they offer: In 2018, My videos have been watched for 23,600 minutes, making an all-time total of 240,900 minutes. The longest watched video is a recording of "Salvation has been Brought Down" recorded at the Diana Singing, at 45,200 minutes.

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 2017, she has 3,255 subscribers, a gain of 600 in 2018! She has 570,800 views for a total of 2.6 Million minutes.

Brent's 2017 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 photos of 2017:

There are several reasons why I might include a photo here. Some of the photos may look they don't belong in a "best of the year" post, but they may be important to me for other reasons. Some of these are my favorite composed shots of my favorite subjects. Some of these are interesting effects while overcoming challenges to get a usable photo. Here we go in no particular order:

I had four photos make Flickr's Explore, which is one of the top photos of the day:


Cheatum Springs General Store


Westphal Hose Co. #5 - Martinsburg, VA


Ravenswood Mansion - Brentwood, TN


Cold Spring School - Portland, TN

Other favorite photos of the year:


Who could forget about the eclipse?


MariLynn and I were at Fort Walton Beach when we saw dolphins do this.


An abandoned grain silo in The Nations area of Nashville received a facelift with a 160 foot tall painting of local resident Lee Estes. On Memorial Day, artist Guido Van Helten, in the bottom left corner, was nearly finished. Bonus fun fact: Mr. Estes is the gradfather of a high-school classmate.


For the Lucky timing shot of the year, I was photographing this late 30's movie theater in Franklin, KY when a late 30's Chevy sedan drove by.


On our way to Florida, we went out of our way to see this National Historic Landmark, which was the site of the Bloody Sunday during the civil rights marches in Selma.


A few years ago, I found this mesmerizing video, but I was particularly interested in the house facade where the rest of the house was missing. After some internet sleuthing, I found it on the East side of Louisville. It faces mostly north, so it is tough to see sunlit. I got there at the perfect time, late in the day in summer. Five minutes later, the sun disappeared behind some apartments.

Other 2017 accomplishments:

I had a couple of published photos this year. My photo of the controversial N.B. Forrest photo along I-65 in Brentwood appeared on the Stephen Colbert show. Also in Brentwood, a lady wanted to buy a photo from a local park. I didn't have one, but my company had me at an event down the road, so I was able to get one for her along the way.

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 2017, I have been to 497 counties, which makes up 15.82% of America. I visited new counties in VA, WV, MD & PA on the way to my nephew's wedding. My family went to Kentucky Kingdom, and we took a roundabout way home to see new counties in IN & KY. Finally, I added a couple of counties in AL on the way to the Florida panhandle. I visited a total of 9 states 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 2017, I took more than 21,000 photos. About 20,000 were of my son. (Not really.)

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to flickr. I now have a total of 9,668 of which about 400 were uploaded in 2017. These photos have been viewed collectively 11,625,320 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 1.3 million views in 2017 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,000 views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. While my hit counter only shows 6,754, I could be a little disheartened. Apparently a lot of people are finding content on my website via google searches and not seeing the home page. My webhost's stats show last year I had 21,345 unique visitors who made 38,577 visits viewing a total of 99,368 page views with 426,370 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 12.28 GB of bandwidth. 40.4% of visitors used Windows which is going down a little every year. 51,7% people browsed with Chrome and 2 people used the older Nokia PDA browser. I set up a Facebook account which now has 91 followers and a twitter feed with 74 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 which for the most part pins 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 937 pins on 15 boards. My most popular pin was the Acme Feed & Seed neon sign which has 132 re-pins, 60 in 2017.

The highlight of my website is the daily blog. Blogger.com's count of page views reports I had 325,927 page views in 8 years, with about 45,000 in 2017. 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. Yesterday, one person typed in "olive pit allergy" and got to my site.

I also have a YouTube channel. Most of my good videos are recordings of my dad's early music groups, but nothing uploaded in 2017. All-time, I have 654,311 views with about 24,300 in 2017. The most popular video has always been "What a Friend we have in Jesus" which was recorded in a 2007 reunion concert of 70's chorale students. That video has 37,799 views all-time but only about 100 in 2017. A new stat they offer: In 2017, My videos have been watched for 25,305 minutes, making an all-time total of 217,373 minutes. The longest watched video is a recording of "Salvation has been Brought Down" recorded at the Diana Singing, at 40,000 minutes.

This year, I'm adding info about MariLynn's youtube channel, which blows mine away. She has a lot of fun with her Tarantulas on it. As of the end of 2017, she has 2,621 subscribers! She has 465,815 views for a total of 2,098,287 minutes

Brent's 2016 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 photos of 2016:

There are several reasons why I might include a photo here. Some of the photos may look they don't belong in a "best of the year" post, but they may be important to me for other reasons. Some of these are my favorite composed shots of my favorite subjects. Some of these are interesting effects while overcoming challenges to get a usable photo. Here we go in no particular order:


Tex's World Famous BarBQ - Nashville, TN
Every Day, Flickr has a formula to pick the top 500 photos uploaded that day.  Those select photos belong to "Explore" and when a photo makes it, it gets several hundred extra views plus a few extra likes.  I spent a couple of days at my company's downtown office, and one day on the drive home I found this old neon sign which got me into Explore.


Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q neon sign - Decatur, AL
My second photo to make Flickr's Explore was also a neon sign of a BarBQ restaurant.


Pulpit Rock - Berlin, TN
As I scour the entire mid-state looking for places to photograph, I love to find the off the beaten path places.  It's even better if it used to be a very important spot, but now nobody knows it's there anymore.  There may be no better example that this rock in a very small town park.


The most noteworthy event in my home of Smyrna this year was the plane crash of Blue Angels pilot Jeff Kuss.  In honor if Kuss, the Davidson County Courthouse in downtown Nashville colored it's lights in Blue Angels Blue and Yellow.  I was outside dealing with a thunderstorm to get this photo.


My family got Nashville Zoo passes this year.  I was fortunate to show up a couple of days after the Gibbon mother and Son went out on public display.


Good lightning shots can be difficult, but this one was a photo highlight of our family beachfront vacation to Panama City Beach.


My third photo to reach Flickr's explore was also a neon sign.  This one was a laundromat in Huntsville.  Neon signs did very well for me this year, especially on Pinterest.


Oscar Mayer Wienermobile
This one was a fulfillment of an item on my bucket list, more than it was a great photo. This iconic and elusive vehicle made a stop at Franklin's 4th of July celebration


Davidson County Courthouse Old and New
The county courthouse in Nashville makes a second appearance on this list. At the beginning of the year, I upgraded my camera equipment with a real wide angle lens. This view would not have been possible without one.  With my previous lens, I could not entirely fit the building on the left in one frame.


This last one is certainly more important to me than it would mean to anyone else. In January it was a beautiful day when the NHL All-star game festivities came to downtown Nashville. I had a fun day even though there was a mob of people. At the same time, something about this photo clicked with me and I now see sunlight reflecting off windows in a different way.

Other 2016 accomplishments:

In 2016, I was finally published in National Geographic! I have often thought of them as the pinnacle of photography. But, did they use my best photo? No, they used a silly photo in a kid's book about famous fails. I guess I need to go actually find that book now.

As it turns out, my other photo to appear in a book was also a children's book. The other one was a book about Major League Baseball star Nelson Cruz. I took a photo of him as a minor-leaguer who came to visit the Nashville Sounds. It must have been the cheapest photo they could find so they wanted to use it.

I did have some serious photos make it onto TV. Knoxville station WBIR used some of my photos of the Whitwell Holocaust Museum in this story. Then, WBIR did a story on endangered historic properties and my photo of the Dandridge courthouse was used.

Other accomplishments include getting a tetanus shot after stepping on a rusty nail in front of the Decatur, AL historic train station and getting a cease-and-desist order from a security guard at the federal courthouse in Knoxville. My company also took me on a tour of Ryman Auditorium as well as the new Nashville Sounds ballpark, so I was able to photograph both of these places without spending my own money. The strangest subject of the year may have been Pinky and the Brain graffiti in Knoxville.

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 2016, I took more than 18,500 photos. About 17,000 were of my son. (Not really.)

Most of my publishing-worthy photos are uploaded to flickr. I now have a total of 9,259 of which about 370 were uploaded in 2016. These photos have been viewed collectively 10,304,620 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 1.5 million views in 2016 doesn't mean as much as it used to. (By comparison, in 2012 I had about 500,000 views.)

2010 was the first year of my website, SeeMidTN.com. While my hit counter only shows 6,028, I could be a little disheartened. Apparently a lot of people are finding content on my website via google searches and not seeing the home page. My webhost's stats show last year I had 15,200 unique visitors who made 24,933 visits viewing a total of 112,2651 page views with 546,486 total hits (the stats exclude the 100,000 hits by robots / spiders / crawlers). the website used 13.01 GB of bandwidth. 46% of visitors used Windows which is going down a little every year. 47% people browsed with Chrome and 2 people used the old-fashioned text-based Lynx browser. I set up a Facebook account which now has 75 followers and a twitter feed with 65 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 which for the most part pins 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 855 pins on 15 boards. My most popular pin was the Acme Feed & Seed neon sign which has 72 repins.

The highlight of my website is the daily blog. Blogger.com's count of page views reports I had 270,334 page views in 6 years, with about 42,000 in 2016. 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. Yesterday, one person typed in "olive pit allergy" and got to my site.

I also have a YouTube channel. Most of my good videos are recordings of my dad's early music groups, but nothing really uploaded in 2016. All-time, I have 629,894 views with 27,341 in 2016. The most popular video has always been "What a Friend we have in Jesus" which was recorded in a 2007 reunion concert of 70's chorale students. That video has 37,693 views all-time but only about 100 in 2015. A new stat they offer: In 2016, My videos have been watched for 31,300 minutes. The most watched video is a recording of "Salvation has been Brought Down" recorded at the Diana Singing.