Catering to the Masses
Sunday, November 18th, 2007I (amazingly) had the day off today. I spent the entire day downloading indie Christmas songs to use at my impending Christmas party. I found some really great, beautiful stuff which I’ll feature here later. I listen to new music nearly every day, but it’s incredibly rare that I find so many beautiful/haunting/infectious songs in one day.
I decided early in the day to capitalize on the sunlight to take a photo lit by something other than a lamp. I started screwing around with one of the scarves I bought in Morocco and came up with this:
I liked it well enough, especially after I fiddled with it in Photoshop, but later, much later, I decided to see if I could get a photo of me with my headphones. Music had been the theme of the day, after all. I took this shot, which I really, really liked:
I uploaded the first photo as an alternate and then uploaded the second as my official choice. By the time the second had uploaded, however, the first had already gotten two “favorites” and one comment - far more attention than any of my recent posts had gotten. Perhaps I was making a mistake by choosing the second as my official choice?
I’d read somewhere that by the nature of flickr’s interface (small thumbnails, white background, etc), photos with bold bright colors and/or strong geometric patterns have the best chance of making the enigmatic Explore (the 500 most interesting photos for a given day). I don’t take my photos with the idea of making Explore, and I gave up trying to guess which ones would make it and which ones wouldn’t.
I really like the second photo best - the processing is better, it’s more pleasing to me compositionally, and it was MUCH more difficult to set up and take. Plus is reflects my day better.
Okay. I’m choosing the second. The masses will have to be catered to by someone else.