Sunday, March 26, 2006

Flickr.com

I've started playing with Flickr. Its a site to store and organize/share/etc. photos. I started off by uploading a few photos and 'tagging' them (like organizing them into folders, except a photo can have more than one tag so its more flexible). You can also browse through other peoples' photographs which is nice but can get boring after a while. So far so good and reasonably interesting.

Then I discovered the "Score Me!" group on Flickr. Here you post a photograph of yours to the group, and at the same time, you rate the previous 5 photographs that were posted. This way you co-operatively get feedback and you can see how your work is evaluated by others and get their technical feedback etc. This is completely cool and at one stroke changes the whole attitude towards Flickr. From being a moderately useful site, it now becomes a fascinating and even addictive site. You're trying to post photos to the group and increase your rank, you're getting useful (and not so useful!) feedback from other people, you are ranking others photos in a serious way so you have to pay attention and see what's really good about a photo and what's not ...

I posted my 'leaf' photo, which I was so kicked about, and which elicited some favourable response from some of the people on this blog, and was much humbled. My average rating was around 5/10 and got some blunt feedback:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29439415@N00/98654894/. Now I'm really keen about paying more attention to my photography and getting better at this stuff. (One thing I've been feeling the lack of, is any photoediting software. Would appreciate help).

This is (one way) that great communities evolve. And there are probably a lot more things about Flickr that I haven't yet explored. Check it out ! I don't have many good photographs uploaded yet myself. To explore the Flickr site, go to the home page and enter any keyword (like nature, tree, nyc) to see photos related to that. Or try:

http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/

You'll find other ways to explore too, on the site.

2 comments:

BrianLaesch.com said...

I think I've heard of it somewhere else.

Anonymous said...

Never mind what the people on flicker.com said. I still maintain it was a great picture and definitely not a dull subject. Some of the best movies out there do not always win at the Oscars :-)