Happy Birthday to Us! Light Stalking Turns Two

Light Stalking turns two today and it's been two very short years of absolute fun.

In that two years, we have had 376 free photography articles, lessons and collections and two free downloadable photography guides!

The community here has gone from strength to strength. After a total redesign in November (by the talented Melody Fassino), 2060 people have joined our new photography forums and uploaded thousands of their photographs. We have a heap of great members who are lending their expertise – from photography teachers through to novices and everybody in between and it has made Light Stalking a much better place for photography lovers.

Traffic was so high and engaged that we got kicked off our old servers by our hosting company – 200,453 people have visited the site this past month. We are closing in on 200,000 Twitter followers (that's just insane) – 190,921 to be exact and growing by hundreds a day! Our Facebook page just reached 15,068 fans and 26,591 people are reading out weekly (well, almost weekly) email photography newsletter!

We're in the top 50,000 websites in the world according to Alexa and have been linked to 28,043 times according to Yahoo site explorer including mentions on incredible sites like Digital Photography School, All Facebook and The Tuts Plus Network. The WeFollow website ranks us in the top 5 most followed and influential photographers on Twitter too.

We are on the Twitter “Who to Follow” list for photography and have been picked up by Flipboard (one the the top 4 Apple Apps of 2010) with other great sites like Mashable and Rolling Stone as well as being mentioned on radio programs too with our articles also appearing in Photo Comment Magazine.

We have had top stories on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and DeviantArt which led to thousands more people finding us too.

We found three very talented regular photography writers in Mike Panic, Christopher O'Donnell and most recently,  Emma Brabrook with some fantastic backup guest blogs from Chris Gin, Tom Dinning, Haydar Turkhan, Shakira Duarte, Tez Mercer and Julianne Markow.

We held our first photography walk in Sydney with the talented Jason Smith which was a huge success with lots of new friends made.

Speaking of new friends, we've connected with other great folks like Patrick and Lee from FStoppers, The Photo Argus, Ed Verosky, Mitchell Kanashkavich, Darren Rowse from DPS and David DuChemin, all of whom we have done a few projects with or have things planned for the future.

The insane thing about all of this is the staggering growth of people who really seem to love coming here. We're easily hitting double figure % growth each month and February was up almost 70%! This ride doesn't look like stopping! In fact, we're already having problems on our new servers (that we moved to about 2 months ago) due to the strain of traffic. (Don't worry, it's a great problem to have!).

So this is a very big thank you to those of you who come here and make this little project such a huge success. Looking at the numbers and the community around Light Stalking is quite humbling.

We have so much more planned for this site, so fasten your seat belts. You ain't seen nothing yet.

Cheers

Rob Wood

Editor, Light Stalking