Photo Subjects

While listening to presentations today, I was interested in what Chris had to say about his interest, photos. We both seem to have a passion for photography, Chris for the aesthetic value, and myself for the stories and memories they hold. He made an interesting comment saying that when people browse around for photos, they usually like to look at artistically provocative ones, not pictures of random people just chillin at a party. That got me thinking about how to make photos like the ones I take, which are not the most artistically inspired, to become interesting to more people that the circle of friends that I take the pictures with.

I went to Flickr to check out how that site was set up and to see what people were interested in. Of course, 15 minutes later, I found that I was just looking at unique pictures that were aesthetically very interesting. I was not searching for a story, just pretty pictures that I enjoyed viewing. So in search for a good story, I did a search for college party to see what I could find from people in my age group. Needless to say, I found a bunch of grainy pictures of random people holding solo cups that I had no interest in investigating further. All things considered, most traditional scrapbooks are not about college parties, but I would like to create a way for normal pictures to become interesting. I think there are two solutions to this problem that I can see now. The first is that the scrapbooks will be more interactive and will have stories behind them. If college parties were your thing, than you could read about what other people are doing at their parties: what games they play, what shows they watch, crazy antics, so on... If I knew more about the people who posted those pictures and what they do for fun, I might be interested in reading about their adventures and contacting them to conduct some of our own someday!

The second option of course would be to make sure that all the albums have tags, so that way you could search for what you are interested in, what area you are in, age group, whatever. That way, if you would rather read about someone's awesome vacation in California and all the cool places they went instead of some college kids drinking from solo cups then the power is yours :)

As a final comment about Flickr, I love how big the community is! Everyone comments on photos and it is fun to read through them. That is exactly what I would like with a scrapbooking environment. Users should be able to comment because they like (or don't like) what they see, and be able to do so freely and happily.