A Scenic World

Charles Black, a frequent poster on one of the photography forums I visited, distilled the idea of entering photo contests and challenges for me with this line: “The most important thing I think people need to keep in mind regarding the challenges is that there can be big difference between ‘good’ and ‘popular’.” Exactly! A photo that’s really, really good isn’t necessarily going to win unless it’s popular with the voters – in this case, fellow photographers.

So now the problem becomes how to figure out which photo isn’t necessarily the best, but the most popular. I use flickr to upload the shots I take on a daily basis, and flickr actually allows its users to see which of your photos has the most views, the most comments, the most “favorites” (when someone else adds it to their list of shots they like), and the elusive “most interesting.” The algorithm to determine “interestingness” is a much-debated secret, but it seems to be a combination of views, comments, and favorites, with more weight given to comments or favorites from photographers who have interesting photos of their own. This seems to be related to the same algorithm that flickr uses to determine which photos make “Explore,” a list of 500 of the most interesting photos from each day.

So let’s take a look at my most interesting photos according to flickr:

#1 Most Interesting

#34 of 365: Look Out

Posted: July 7, 2007

Views: 1458

Favorites: 78

Comments: 36

Notes: This was one of my first photos to ever make “Explore,” and because my photostream didn’t have a particularly large audience before, even a modest bump in views and favorites made this shot skyrocket to position #15 for the day – and thus to the front page of Explore. That in turn led to more views, more favorites, etc. etc.

#2 Most Interesting

#365 of 365: Just a Girl with a Camera

Posted: May 28, 2008

Views: 1285

Favorites: 57

Comments: 52

Notes: As you can see, this was the 365th day of my 365 project. It’s customary for members of the group to post their congratulatory messages on this day, regardless of whether the photo is particularly good or not. That’s partially why there are so many more comments on this one than the one above.

#3 Most Interesting

#290 of 365: Broken

Posted: March 14, 2008

Views: 2017

Favorites: 217

Comments: 74

Notes: This photo also made the front page of Explore, but it came amidst a longish streak of me posting other popular photos. So while it is considered very interesting by Flickr’s standards, it wasn’t a magnitude more interesting than other photos I was posting at that time.

#4 Most Interesting

And So It Ends

Posted: October 27, 2007

Views: 758

Favorites: 30

Comments: 24

Notes: I had been in Spain and Morocco for 18 days and hadn’t uploaded anything the entire time. I came back and uploaded 13 photos from the trip, with this one as the last one – and hence the first photo that people visiting my stream saw. It immediately garnered attention from my contacts – with a lot of “Welcome back!” comments, and compared to the complete inactivity preceding it was considered very interesting.

#5 Most Interesting

#35 of 365: That Fresh Feeling

Posted: July 3, 2007

Views: 799

Favorites: 22

Comments: 24

Notes: This photo was chosen to be the group icon of the 365 flickr group, which at the time had an enthusiastic following of a few thousand people (it’s even more now). Just by virtue of its being chosen, it skyrocketed in popularity, leading to its place on this list. It was also posted only 1 day after the top-ranked pic above. They kind of piggy-backed on each other’s popularity.

I think it’s obvious that most of the photos you see above are considered interesting for environmental factors – returning from a trip, ending my project, being chosen as the group icon – and not for an inherent interestingness of the photos themselves, at least compared to other photos I’ve taken. Not coincidentally, most of these photos were taken very early in my flickr career as well – I only got my first DSLR at the end of April 2007. Prior to that, the only frequent followers I had for my flickr account were a few real-life friends and a very few online friends. Yet 3 of the 5 photos listed above were taken and posted within six months of me getting my camera; these photos were so much more popular relative to the crap I had been posting that they stood out tremendously, even though I’ve had photos that garnered far more attention since then (and that I consider to be much better). In fact, I have to go all the way down to my 16th most popular photo to find ANYTHING taken in 2009.

I also cannot discount the effect that having a photo in the 365 group pool has. As I said, this group has thousands of members, and they tend to be very active and very generous with their comments and favorites. It’s no coincidence that 4 of the 5 were from this project and posted in this group.

So basically, all I can tell from looking at flickr’s list is which photos were more popular that the photos I posted around the same dates. Had my photostream always been as popular as it is now, I can guarantee that this lineup would look starkly different, although it would still be biased toward self-portraits because of my involvement with the 365 group.

But all in all, I’m no closer to finding my best photo.

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An addendum to yesterday’s post: allow me to address one issue I made yesterday – the tendency of some people to vote negatively when they see post-processing work. I didn’t mean to categorically insult anyone. I’ve just noticed that even with photo contests where unlimited post-processing is allowed, some people give an image a low score only because an entry has post-processing. Obviously if the post-processing is poorly done, the photo might deserve a low vote. But if the entrant follows the rules and posts a well-processed shot, it seems a bit unfair, in my opinion, to award low votes just because the photo utilized post-processing that was allowed by the rules.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.