Saturday, November 15, 2008

Popular photos vs. ugly photos


Fern, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Recently I have been using Flickr for storing my photos online. Although I have several other places set up as well, for example Picasa and Me.com, I have been quite happy with Flickr, at least so far.

The site is of course oriented towards "popular" photos, not so for "serious" photographers exhibiting their craft. But I haven't big complaints. I know that sometimes the photos may load a bit slowly, but I hope that is not a big problem.

One interesting aspect of Flickr are the commeting, noting, contacting and favoriting features, where the users can discuss and make notes to the photos, and follow their favourite photo submitters. I haven't been active in that forum, but I have received some useful feedback from the users, commenting on the images I have uploaded (1,587 items at this moment).

You also get to see statistics on your photos. I would imaging you can get quite obsessive about that. Today I browsed some of my recent photos, and it was interesting to see which photos had got a lot of views. Surprisingly, it is not always the "beautiful" or sugary photos which get attention. Sometimes it is quite the opposite, it may be the ugly and the rough photos which are popular, and even became favourites for some Flickr users.

In any case, here is a recent photo which was intentionally a bit sugary - a typical photo subject, framed in such a way as to show the simple repeating shapes. A dozen or so views so far, not bad for such a common image. But I'm not sure if I contributed in any significant way by uploading this image to Flickr. For me it was more of a technical excercise (getting everything sharp in low-light handheld photo with shallow depth of field at f/2.0) than an artistic expression.

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