thechrisproject photography

Popularity is an odd thing. It’s not something I’m used to and certainly something that I don’t fully understand. I’m talking, of course, about picture popularity. Flickr has been my photo outlet and feedback ground as of late. It’s got its ins and outs, ups and downs, but I generally like it. Yes, I get sick of going on to forums and seeing the same question for the thousandth time (”WHAT LENS SHOULD I GET?!?!”), but there are a lot of talented people and a lot of really nice people there. It has provided the positive feedback I needed to push myself when I was starting up my photo habit again.

It’s funny what gets really high numbers on Flickr. “What are these numbers of which he speaks?,” you might be asking yourself if you are not a flickr user. The numbers are: views, favorites, and comments. Views are how many people have viewed your photo. Favorites are the number of times that a flickr user has marked your photo as a favorite. Comments are the number of comments left by flickr users. Then, out of these numbers and some magic, arises something flickr calls “interestingness“.

In December I went out and shot a lot of misty night shots. Here are two from that night:

I was still sitting on one of the best pictures of the night, though. I just didn’t know how to approach it. In the end, the post work was very minimalist. I worked the curves a little and recovered a little of the red from the lights, but that was pretty much it. I posted it up thinking it would get about the same reaction as the ones posted above.

It didn’t. People like it. It’s got a cool effect, bright colors, motion, and tons of light. It’s number 2 as far as interestingness of my pics goes, it’s number one for comments and number two for favorites. It’s down the list for views, but it’s only been up for a little while. I was pretty surprised.

Here’s a picture I took this weekend of a similar environment (night, fog, lights, etc) but one that gets about the usual reaction:

If you’ll believe me, it’s my best night/fog picture yet.

So why the popularity surge? I think part of it has to do with how people consume flickr photos. The big thing is that most people’s first exposure to any random photo on flickr, one that has been put in pools, is a very small 100px thumbnail, like the ones posted at the beginning of this post. A picture with any amount of detail and subtlety will get lost in a thumbnail that small. Take, for instance, this picture of a bee on a flower:

You can’t see shit at that small. It looks like some blobs of grey of various shades. Woo-hoo! If you look at in a large size, you’ll see the shading and detail in the flower and the bee. It looks great in print. It looks okay large. It looks crappy at even 300 pixels. The other big thing is that, besides being small, the context is important. If you look at pics in a pool of hundreds, your brain is going to filter photos out. The ones with relatively subdued colors aren’t going to pop out at you as much.

I’m not bitter or trying to make excuses or anything, I’m just trying to blab about the idiosyncrasies of flickr as a viewing medium. It has its quirks, but I really like it.

Derby Bout March 2007

So, two weeks after the event, I finished my 30 derby pictures. I took about 600, so having 30 represents an improvement in quality for me. I’ve been really busy the past few weeks with car buying and other assorted life-administration tasks. Ugh. I’d like to do some more work on some of these. I feel like there is some potential. I particularly like this one:

I didn’t even realize that she had a knife. I just liked the way she was standing. I composed the shot really quickly and fired off three shots with different people walking in front of her. This one turned out the best. Not only does she have a knife (why does she have a knife?), but she’s looking at another person in front of her. It’s positively murderous.

After this I have a derby practice to sort through, and a few hundred pictures from the Against Me! show I went to last weekend. Then I have some serious portfolio work to get down to.

I’ve been been made a moderator of the Madison, Wisconsin Flickr group. This is exciting because the mods thus far have done a lot of work to make this an active group. I have recently come to believe that one of the great underused abilities of the internet is that ability to bring people in a geographic community together. There are lots of great opportunities to talk and perhaps meet people around the country and world, but I want to use the internet to meet people that live in my neighborhood and town and talk with them.

I’m currently working on getting my roller derby pictures together. I shoot about 600 at the bout and 100 or so at practice the week after. I’ve been car shopping lately and just really busy in general, so I’ve been a little short on time. Here’s my latest photograph:

This is the original version:

And here’s me taking this picture:

Q

I was shooting a local band at a dim venue (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). I started out at 1600 for the opener. There were a few fans taking pictures with flash, so I figured I’d fire off a few as well. I set the ISO down to 400, changed mode manual and set my aperture and shutter speed. Throughout the night I’d occasionally switch to my on camera flash, always careful to switch between modes, but never careful to set the ISO back. So I took a few hundred shots at 400 that I meant to take at 800 or 1600. Some of them had some really cool motion in them:

Some of them just turned out perfectly normal:

Usually I’d catch this sort of thing between bands, but during the break there was a double hit and run accident in front of the club so I got all excited by that and forgot to do my requisite chimping.

All in all, I came out with a few usable pictures, but lost more than I usually do. I hope it happens to everyone at least once, so I don’t feel like such an idiot. Got any good "I forgot this basic thing" stories?

This post originally posted in a Flickr thread.