Flickr
I discovered the Flickr photographic web site a few weeks ago and am very impressed with the many things it does. You can upload photos to the site and use them solely for your own purposes of storing them as backup and viewing them when you please. It also allows you to share photos with anyone you specify and limit viewing to those people. But the real fun starts when you make photos public, which allows them to be seen by anyone who uses Flickr. Each photo can be assigned as many descriptive tags as you like and Flickr’s search feature then lets you find photos by tag. Finally, you can place your photos in Groups of similar subject matter. Flickr tells you when a new photo has been added to one of your groups.
There are over a million photos on Flickr. It has been in operation for two years. Many of the images are beautiful and serve as a good photographic education. You can mark any public photo as your personal favorite and see them presented to you in a slide show.
As impressive as these many features are, even more enjoyable are Groups that will comment on and suggest improvements to your photos. The C.A.F.E group allows you to enter any of your photographs and members of the group than suggest changes that they think will improve it as a photograph. It is an immense value to a budding photographer and a great opportunity to learn from knowledgeable people.
I submitted my photo of three umbrella carrying people outside the Miho Museum in Kansai. (You can see it if you click on the 2nd group of Flickr pictures labeled My Photos on the right sidebar.) A number of people made excellent comments; some even redid the cropping to demonstrate their approach. This led me to redo the photo and resulted in a much better photograph.
The process made me realize something about the difference between good photographs and pictures taken to provide personal memories. I always liked the original of this photo because it reminded me of my experience visiting the Miho Museum near Kyoto. It was built on the top of a mountain and a major effort was made to preserve the remote natural environment (shearing the top of the mountain off, erecting the building, and recreating as much of the natural scenery as possible as 75% of the museum was placed underground}. My picture reminded me of the setting and that is what I see when I look at it. But that personal meaning doesn't necessarily translate into a good photograph that will interest someone else who doesn’t bring similar personal memories to bear. A good photograph better stand on its own. I guess I will just keep both of them for different reasons, but it is clear that the revised photo is the much better photograph.
There are over a million photos on Flickr. It has been in operation for two years. Many of the images are beautiful and serve as a good photographic education. You can mark any public photo as your personal favorite and see them presented to you in a slide show.
As impressive as these many features are, even more enjoyable are Groups that will comment on and suggest improvements to your photos. The C.A.F.E group allows you to enter any of your photographs and members of the group than suggest changes that they think will improve it as a photograph. It is an immense value to a budding photographer and a great opportunity to learn from knowledgeable people.
I submitted my photo of three umbrella carrying people outside the Miho Museum in Kansai. (You can see it if you click on the 2nd group of Flickr pictures labeled My Photos on the right sidebar.) A number of people made excellent comments; some even redid the cropping to demonstrate their approach. This led me to redo the photo and resulted in a much better photograph.
The process made me realize something about the difference between good photographs and pictures taken to provide personal memories. I always liked the original of this photo because it reminded me of my experience visiting the Miho Museum near Kyoto. It was built on the top of a mountain and a major effort was made to preserve the remote natural environment (shearing the top of the mountain off, erecting the building, and recreating as much of the natural scenery as possible as 75% of the museum was placed underground}. My picture reminded me of the setting and that is what I see when I look at it. But that personal meaning doesn't necessarily translate into a good photograph that will interest someone else who doesn’t bring similar personal memories to bear. A good photograph better stand on its own. I guess I will just keep both of them for different reasons, but it is clear that the revised photo is the much better photograph.
posted by John Weiss at 2:48 PM
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