A couple of days ago I looked outside after breakfast and noticed fog. I immediately decided to go out with my camera to take advantage of the atmosphere. I didn’t have a lot of time, I had to go to work afterwards, so I just walked out my front door and headed for a little stroll around my neighbourhood.
There is a bicycle path around the area where I live, and I liked the line-up of trees so I took some photo’s here. But I thought there was something missing, a biker or something would make it less boring, so I hang around for a while waiting for a morning commuter. After a couple of minutes I thought: ‘This is nuts, it’s cold, and I have to get to work, so move on’, and I walked along the footpath to continue my round. Then around the corner came a biker, so I ran back to my position, and quickly took some photo’s. I wanted to time the shot so that the biker would be between the tree-trunks. Below is the series of photo’s I took, and you can see I succeeded with none of them. In all versions some part of the biker coincides with a tree. Or: keep practising!
Although I didn’t succeed completely, I decided that I liked the first one enough to publish it on my Flickr stream (https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaukje/16326147345/). Then the next morning, I had about a hundred notifications from my Flickr app, telling me that a lot of people faved this photo. Now experienced, long-term Flickr users may not be impressed by this, but my photo’s on Flickr usually have 1-5 faves (if I’m lucky), and my most successful photo (The Rower) had 14 faves, so the 85 faves I had at that moment (it has grown since then) is a lot for me. I also had a new comment congratulating me with Explore. This had never happened before. Explore on Flickr is a daily selection of the photo’s published that day. Probably around 2 Million photo’s are published on a daily basis, and with a secret formula (based on amount of activity) Flickr makes a selection of those and presents them on the Explore page. And my biker was selected, to be specific, this photo ended at position 195! I have no idea how this happened. But to be honest, I liked it a lot 🙂 . I had posted this photo in four groups on Flickr, all of which I had posted in before. I do not have a lot of followers (well, due to an explored photo it grew from 60 to 93), but somehow it made it through the Flickr filter. And it is really nice to get this kind of reward and a lot of kind and encouraging comments as well.
But…. I do not think this is my best photo. In fact, I do not even think this was my best photo of this morning. The photo below is my favourite from the day.
It is a bit minimalistic, but I like the atmosphere and the serenity. Some more shots from this morning:
So why is the photo with the biker so successful on Flickr? I am not sure, a bit of luck, a bit of optimal timing I guess. And I notice something else with my photo’s: people usually like photo’s with people in it. And besides that, on a medium as Flickr where there are a lot of photo’s presented on a page, it helps if it is clear what the picture is about in a split second. With the photo of the biker you can recognise from a mile away that there are trees, and from half a mile away that there is a biker, so people immediately get the setting. My guess is that this is one condition for getting a lot of faves. The other parts….. maybe I will find out if more photo’s get explored 🙂 .
Like with The Rower, why not use this unexpected succes as an omen, so I submitted this photo for the NRC photo-competition too:
http://foto.nrc.nl/Picture/view/4268#picture
Let’s see what happens…