A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit the historical and charming Quebec City with a friend. On a sunny yet extremely cold Sunday morning, we roamed the streets snapping pictures detailing the old architecture and quaint narrow streetscapes of Old Quebec. We stopped to warm up in a cafe and took turns looking at the pictures I’d taken on my cameras tiny LCD and my friend was surprised at how many pictures I had taken and the varying quality of each. Although he was pretty familiar my Flickr photostream, I realized that viewing these pictures freshly taken on the LCD was quite a different experience for him. Not only were there more pictures, many of them variations on the same theme, but some of them were a bit off - perhaps slightly slanted or in need of a tighter crop. I don’t do a lot of Photoshopping, but I do like to clean the pictures up a bit. My Photoshop philosophy is very similar to my make up philosophy - I’ll darken my eyelashes with a bit of mascara smooth out my complexion a bit of concealer but I don ‘t try to hide the fact that I have freckles or try to convince anyone that my lips are red instead of pink.
All of this got me thinking about the process of taking and sharing pictures. Clearly, the advent of digital photography has changed the way pictures are taken - I can assure you that I wouldn’t have taken 400+ photographs over three days if I was shooting film. I have more pictures of my weekend in Quebec City than I do of film photographs of my trips to Guatemala and Greece combined. Looking back to 2003 when I first started taking digital pictures while traveling Southeast Asia, I took a mere 344 pictures after spending a week at the highly photogenic Angkor Wat. Not only am I now taking more pictures, but I’m also sharing a lot more of them, thanks to great tools like Flickr. As I was browsing my archives, I couldn’t help but wonder what the relationship between pictures taken and pictures posted is and if this relationship changes over time. On the one hand, I like to think that the ratio decreases over time as presumably I’ll be taking better pictures. On the other hand, the more time I spend taking pictures, the more I want to take and the more I want to experiment. I decided to graph the ratio between pictures taken vs. pictures posted over the past six months to see if there were any patterns and came up with the following graph:
From the variation of the graph it looks as though some photo shoots turn out better than others. I also haven’t taken into account that some of those collections include photos for other projects not meant for my Flickr stream. On average though, I upload 19% of the pictures I take from a particular outing which pretty much matches the number that I had in mind before charting the data. I think that this number says a lot about my own creative process. Whether it is photographing or writing, I tent to start out with a sort of “stream of consciousness” approach to get it all out, then edit and revise numerous rough drafts until I feel that I’m happy with the outcome. I’d be interested to hear what other people’s number are - how does selecting and editing impact your own creative process, whether it is writing, painting, photography or any other creative pursuit?
On Friday February 24, 2006, Hamilton Artists Inc. presented Interactive Interactive an interactive multimedia show of McMaster and Sheridan multimedia student works. I was an entrant back in 2004 and was honoured to be a judge this time around. The student works were excellent and playing around with them on the Smart Boards was a lot of fun.
Interestingness is an attribute assigned to Flirck photographs based on the ever-illusive “interestingness” algorithm. No one is quite sure how it works, but having a photo make it to the Interestingness page is something that, at one point or another, most Flickrites have aspired to. Although there is much debate over the photos selected by the algorithm, an interestingness raking still seems to be a measure of success in the Flickr world - interestingness has become equated with famousness. Having read several posts of users fretting over their lack of interestingness status, I was please to come across a post with this quote by the graffiti artist Banksy:
The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.
I’ve always been weary of fame for the sake of fame. Although there are some who have succeeded in becoming famous by wanting to be famous, I wholeheartely agree with Banksy when he says that fame is the result of “making something that means something”. As an artist, I feel that it is my responsiblity to put my artwork out there and as mentioned in the previous post, I may agree or disagree by how it is recieved. In the end, it is up to the audience and not some algorthim to judge my work. An algorithm my be able to determine “interestingness” but only an audience of viewers can determine whether it means something or not.
Using the very cool Mosaic Tool from fd√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Flickr Toys, I’ve compiled this mosaic of my 20 most favorited pictures on Flickr over the past year:
Interestingly enough, I’ve only choose 5 of these 20 pictures in my own collection of personal favorites. Not that I don’t like all of the ones pictured above, however, I wouldn’t consider some of them to be my personal best. I’m intrigued by this difference, as often times I’ve posted a photo that I didn’t really like that others have really responded to and vice versa. As I’m selecting pictures to upload I’m often aware of this difference but I try not to let it affect my selection process and in the end I choose the photos that I feel are my best. Experience has shown that it’s impossible to predict how an audience will respond, especially in a domain as subjective and diverse as photography. To each his own I suppose - I’m just grateful to have an audience.
I just updated the WordPress theme from a modified form of Kubrick template to a modified form of K2 template. Both themes are by Binary Bonsai with K2 being the latest and greatest offering. K2 is more than just another pretty WordPress template though, as it has a bunch of great new features including schemes (which is an easy way to modify the K2 theme) and plugin support. I’m currently using the del.ici.ous cached plugin to display my del.ici.ous bookmarks and I’ve implemented the fantanstic Flickr RSS plugin on my personal blog.
Originally published December 9, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just installed the Flickr Gallery for WordPress which allows me to display my Flickr photo sets in my blog. The installation wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped (it took about an hour and a half) as it turns out the readme file fails to mention a crucial step. The plugin can be downloaded here and the instillation instructions (with all of the steps) can be found here.
Originally published June 8, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
