Flickr = contact sheets?

Fields and a pylon, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Crooked icicles, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I have been using Flickr for storing my public (non-family) photos since last summer. At some point I realized I was using Flickr for a different reason than many others. For me Flickr is about storage, not about exhibiting or presenting my photos. Thus, I'm not selective in what I upload, I just put there the good along the bad. (But I do make a coarse preliminary selection, discarding the technically failed photos, so I'm not posting 50 or 100 or 200 photos to Flickr daily, only a few dozen.)

I find it regrettable that few photographers publish their failed photos. It would be possible to learn from them. The perfect or good ones don't provide this learning experience.

Today I continued reading the book "On being a photographer", the chapter on using contact sheets. This chapter is of course outdated nowadays, a thing of the film era.

But then I realized that perhaps I'm using Flickr in the same way as photographers were using contact sheets. In fact, the writers of the book recommended sharing contact sheets. Not only do they provide insight and inspiration for other photographers, someone may discover something worthwhile in the discarded photos.

The two photos here are from the opposite ends of my current photography. The first (from today) has a "beautiful" landscape and a touch of color on the sky. The second (from yesterday) is coarse and ugly, depicting decay.

I'm sort of interested in developing this second type of photography, but would the photos be less interesting for viewers then? Some kind of beauty is needed to catch the eye, and that is hard to get with subjects such as this one. Or - more probably - I just don't have the skill.