Flickr, Interestingness and Addiction

I had, on Monday, the opportunity to read this article on FlickrNation. The article presents 10 tips to get more people looking at your photos posted on Flickr. Most of the tips seem to center on building yourself into the community. I like this. I used to only favorite those pictures taken by friends which I wanted to have a way back to. Now I use the favorite button like a thumbs-up, or a "Nice Job". When I give someone the thumbs-up they see that I have done so and take a look at my pictures in return. The same concept works for commenting as well.
I am now addicted. Looking at random pictures commenting and favoriting away. There's nothing disingenuous about this either. I love looking at random snippets of peoples lives and its great to give someone a thumbs-up. I'm an addict now.

So, is this all just attention whoring? Yes. But also no. Other than the occasional ego stroke, the fact that people are viewing my pictures puts on the pressure to produce and to maintain a level of quality that I otherwise wouldn't.

File it under pressure to produce. Despite the way I was feeling after work I decided to take some outdoor pictures. I've long thought about shooting some pictures along this particular stretch of the Post Road in Norwalk. It's particularly ugly and commercial and even features a stunningly rusty radio tower. The weather, however, was a bit more than I bargained for and I didn't go nuts walking around the area.


My goal for the evening was to take a series of photos, at different exposures, that I could later use for HDR processing. Unfortunately, I'm a terrible novice at this particular technique and so I didn't really manage to produce anything. I did however produce a nice non-HDR still image. Here it is.