I take a lot of photos. I stick a handful of them on Flickr. And yesterday afternoon, somewhere around 4pm, they were looked at for the millionth time. I'm very humbled.
Those are my five most interesting photos, according to Flickr's mysterious "interestingness" algorithm. I'm not quite sure what this proves, but I think it means that my viewers have good taste. Top of the pile are the seaforts at Shivering Sands in the Thames Estuary. I took 60 photos bobbing about in a speedboat, and posted six, but it's this particular one that seems to have captured the imagination. Then there's the fireworks at the London Eye for New Year 2006 (top of the list until last week), followed by the now-being-demolished platforms at Blackfriars. Number four is the very last Routemaster chugging through Piccadilly Circus, and the fifth is a gas storage tank in Canvey Island. Some I planned carefully, but most I just got lucky.
And those are the next five. That curvy one in the middle is my favourite. It's a meander on the River Cuckmere, snapped at the end of a long walk along the coast from Beachy Head, and discovering it was like being back on a school field trip. The photo's been published in a book, thanks to appearing on Flickr, and it's also being used by the BBC to help the nation's 16 year olds to revise for their Geography GCSEs. I am well chuffed. And it beats the old days where I'd have taken a photo, collected the prints from the local chemist and hidden the results away in an album. These days everyone's a communal photographer, and our images are available for almost instant consumption via a myriad of webpages, feeds, and streams.
I'm fortunate, being a blogger, that my photos get rather more exposure than they might do otherwise. I can write a sentence like "I was watching the sheep on London Bridge yesterday" and almost guarantee that 100 of you will be curious enough to click through and take a look. I can mention a new Flickr pic on Twitter and entice scores of you across to see what I'm talking about. I can even trick you into looking at something I know you're not interested in (look, it's a photograph of me), which rather demeans the photo statistics a bit. Even so, I'm honoured that every single one of my photos (bar one posted last week) has been viewed more than 50 times, even the shots I've never mentioned here.
A lot of my 1000000 views have come from people surfing in via search engines. For some reason a lot of Googlers are interested in what the Harrods Food Hall looks like, and the 80s council houses on the site where the Krays grew up, and the Hogwarts Quidditch lawn. But the majority of views are from you lot taking a look at somethingextra to illustrate a post of mine, which is immensely reassuring. Oh yes it's been quite a journey, from the ten-year old me taking dire photos with a cheap plastic instamatic to today's multi-megapixel online uploads. Thanks a million.
