Friday, June 19, 2009

So there is this photo website that I like to post photos on (jpgmag.com). It is a magazine that publishes all photos and all are from this website. Thousands of photographers are on this website uploading around 3,000 photos a day. It’s photo heaven, really. But with so many people, it’s hard to get noticed. As part of the magazine, those running it create photo themes and you can post one photo in each theme—one photo per theme and one theme per photo. I have many photos in the themes, and recently they posted a new theme called Nature Conquers Man, basically around the idea that nature really does rule over man, much as we may work to destroy it, and can be very destructive to human made things. Perfect theme, I thought, for a couple of my Wilmore photos, so I looked at them and chose this photo, which I’d uploaded a couple weeks or so ago, not long after I took it, and had just happened to title “Rain.” Each photo has the option to become a favorite (anyone can “favorite” any photo and you can “favorite” as many photos as you wish), and the ability to be commented on, and above each photo you have downloaded it tells how many people have favorited that photo and how many comments it has. It also tells you how many times it has been viewed and, if it’s in one of the three themes coming up for the issue of the magazine, you also have the ability to see how many times it has been voted on. Votes are cast by those of us who participate in the site.

Photos get easily lost in the shuffle of daily (minute-ly, really) downloads and most of my recent photos have fewer than ten views, or perhaps closer to thirty if they’re in a theme. But when I got on today, I noticed a curious thing. The most views any of my photos has is close to 275—this for a photo that has been on there a long time and has rather eye-catching colors (it’s cross-processed slide film, which is known for its unpredictable vividness). Today, though, I noticed that this above posted photo, a photo that has been on there for less than two weeks had over two-hundred views. This seemed strange to me, but I didn’t know what was going on with it. A little later I got on and saw the number had more than doubled and I was sure there was a glitch in the system. This number was growing too quickly for it to be for real. Just a few minutes ago I logged in and the number was over 500. And then I thought of something. On the home page, the magazine will profile a few pictures from a selection of three themes in three different categories—themes that will be featured in the next issue, special features that will not, and selections from specific photo challenges, which usually have a closing date on the them, unlike the regular themes. Nature Conquers Man is a photo challenge which closes in July and when I went back to the home page, I saw that it was one of the themes selected for that showcase and sure enough, of the few that were chosen from this theme, my picture was one of them.

It was the first time any of my photos on that site were getting any kind of recognition. I was surprised, and it definitely made me smile. For a day that was only so-so, that was a good way to end.