Posts Tagged ‘flickr’

There’s apparently a meme going around where photographers are posting the sixth photo from the sixth page of their Flickr stream. Here’s mine, a shot of Bret from Cre8camp:

HT: Thomas Hawk

Flickr’s Explore section allows users to, um, explore, the most popular photos on the service. The top 500 photos (as ranked by Flickr’s Interestingness algorithm) uploaded each day are included in Explore.

I’ve had around two dozen photos in Explore (photo set here). Recently I noticed that this photo was ranked #1 overall for its day.

The interesting part is that among my photos, this one really doesn’t do too much for me. It’s a telesmash that IMO isn’t very well composed. As soon as I took this shot in the field I was mad at myself for cutting off the top part of the smoke. Apparently the Flickr community disagrees, and I’m not going to argue with the masses that think this was the best photo uploaded to Flickr last year on May 22, but it’s a reminder that one’s opinion of a shot is heavily subjective. The community says it’s great, but I see room for improvement.

After some consideration, I’ve changed the licensing on my Flickr stream; all of my work there is now available under the Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works license. In short, you may use and share the photos for non-commercial purposes, unaltered, as long as you provide attribution to Aaron Hockley as the photographer. A link to hockleyphoto.com is always appreciated.

This was a decision made considering a variety of factors including the desire to share my work with the community and the changing landscape of professional photography.

Head over to Flickr, view all of my collections or sets, or browse by tag. If you’re down with RSS, you can subscribe to my Flickr feed as well. Enjoy!

I use Firefox as my browser for Flickr, primarily because I can use several Greasemonkey scripts which add usability features to the Flickr pages. If you’re not familiar with Greasemonkey, it’s a Firefox add-on which allows scripts to be run which alter the display of a web page.

In no particular order, here are the scripts I use for Flickr along with links to the scripts and a short description of what they do:

Flickr EXIF Decorator: adds a small overlay to the upper left corner of an image displaying some basic EXIF information when the mouse is hovered over the image.

Flickr Move comment form up: moves the comment box to the top of the other comments (right below the photo).

Flickr New Contact More Links: adds additional information to the “someone added you as a contact” messages from Flickr, including links to the person’s Explore photos and thumbnails of their most interesting pictures.

Flickr Multi Group Sender: enables the ability to send a photo to more than one group via the “Send to Group” button in Flickr.

FlickrPM: adds a bunch of icons next to usernames in Flickr that link directly to profiles, FlickrMail, most interesting, and other options.

Thoughts? Suggestions for other good scripts I might enjoy? Leave a comment below…

Despite the fact that I sell photos for profit as a business, I post a ton of my work to Flickr, where it’s available to be viewed by a community of millions of users from around the globe. Many photographers won’t use sites such as Flickr due to a fear that folks will use the site to obtain and use their work illegally. It’s a valid concern, but not one that prevents me from sharing online.

I’m a strong believer in copyright and the ownership of one’s work. I’m also a strong believer in giving back to a community, and the reality is that no photographer is truly self-taught. We all look at the works of others and improve our technique from what we see. A diverse, large community of photographers (such as that on Flickr or photo.net) provides a great resource for learning. Regardless of your particular photographic interests, equipment, or locations, there’s likely to be a Flickr group for that topic. A Flickr pro membership is only $25/year and the amount of quality work, discussion, and inspirations make it a great investment for any photographer.

I post my photos to Flickr in order to participate and give back to the photo community. The images are of a resolution which looks great on screen but isn’t of a high enough quality to be used for a large print. Flickr provides a good method to easily organize and share a variety of my work, and my Flickr stream has led to quite a few referrals and photo leads (actually just last night I was contacted by someone about licensing a photo they saw on Flickr).

Could someone steal a photo? Potentially. Do I feel that the benefit of the community and potential sales leads outweighs the risk of someone swiping a low-res image? Yes. Until something changes to tip that balance, you’ll continue to find a bunch of my work on Flickr.