1/2 Million Views Can't Be Wrong

Agave, originally uploaded by the other Martin Taylor.

I hit a small milestone on Flickr this week as I passed over half a million views on my stream. Of course 500,000 views is small potatoes for the flickr-concienci but for me it is vaguely thrilling idea that I have an 'audience'. I come from a culture where a photo enthusiast might show the work (s)he was proud of to a couple of family of friends, at the very most they might show the image at a camera club or competition. These days we all can put our work out there for ourselves and connect with others just as obsessed with making images as ourselves across continents, languages and timezones.

A quick calculation reveals that, averaged across all my posted images that is a little over 150 views per image. If only it were so. In reality my average image gets somewhere between 7 and 50 views with the rest of my hits skewed amongst a few 'popular' images. My most popular image with more than 14,000 views is an image I mercenarily titled and tagged “Live Nude Girls” - the horn dogs on flickr far exceeded my expectations and Patti feels that I should take this image down. I agree with her but I'm competitive enough with her, and she is so rapidly gaining on my little success, that I can't give up the steady stream of hits my tabloid bait image generates.

My next most popular image is one of Desi as a puppy – actually it is slightly soft but everyone loves cute puppies so they overlook this technical faux pas. Cute dogs are just occasional fair for my camera these days but they do generate me a lot of hits. Also consistent earners for me are pictures of cameras I have taken to illustrate Camerapedia. Related to this, pictures of other equipment and my desk setups in my home and work offices are incredibly popular – equipment nerds are my tribe. Amongst my top 20 most popular images 1, possibly 2, are pictures of an artistic leaning that I am proud of. In fact, the images I am actually most proud off hardly register on my stats radar which goes to show I have very little idea what I am talking about.

That said, I did enter 2 images in our camera club's session judged by an outside expert yesterday and they both placed in his 5 selected favorites ( http://photochrome.org/2008/09/05/september-judge-choices/ ) - one of Patti's placed too so we both went home happy. The truth is I was going to show 2 completely different images but Patti persuaded me to switch. She was right of course; she (nearly) always is.

The conclusion? I know I can take a good picture – I just don't know which one it is.