I got Flickr

Doc pushed me over the edge, and I've gotten a Flickr account. I uploaded 900 or so photos yesterday. It's a folder of pictures I gathered when I was getting ready for my first Around The Coyote art fair in 2003.

In the past 8 years I've taken well over 60,000 digital photos. People assume I do nothing but click the shutter all day long, but it's not really true. When it costs anywhere between 20 and 50 cents per exposure, you tend to think before you click... for me an addition exposure is essentially free, so I tend to take multiple views of things, and experiment quite a bit.

The real cost of a good set of pictures is the price of the metadata. The cameras all embed quite a bit of info in the photo, the kind of things Ansel Adams and his generation had to write down and keep track of by hand. It's only now beginng to dawn on me how nice it is to have this info, and the computers in the cameras have been doing it for me all along.

Flickr uses this metadata in a way I hadn't imagined... it grabs the original exposure date, and uses it to build a calendar of the photos I upload, automatically! It's VERY cool.

So, now I can refer to all of my online photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/--mike--/ as well as the cool set of shots I got on September 3, 2001. There is also a calendar based on the upload date, which for me is far less important, but might not be for others.

It's amazing what $25 can buy these days. I'm very pleased with the results so far.

Now, to add more value, I need to add more tags, which will take a lot of time, but I expect to be worth every minute as well.

--Mike--