robbeiflex
Well-known
If you analyse your photo-sharing site statistics, what entertaining trends do you find, and what do you learn from them?
I've noticed that a few recent threads have discussed the effects of the internet on photography. I know I shouldn't generalize, but they mostly revolve around the photos that formerly ended up in shoeboxes in an attic or would not have been not taken at all, and are now all over Facebook, Flickr, etc. with loads of compliments. This prompted me to take a look through my Flickr stats, and see if they contained any insights into how I might improve my photography.
Here is a quick summary of my own stats to get things started:
The "favourites" don't tell me much and the comments are mostly chit-chat with people I either know personally or through RFF.
The "views" are where things get interesting:
- 1 of a hotel dining room table with well over 3,000 views - I like the photo a lot but I have no idea why it is so popular
- 1 of a bicycle in a shop window in Singapore with over 500 views
- Some portraits with between 200 and 400 views - an interesting guy in Toronto with a weird beard who walked up to me and said "take my picture", my friend where I caught him at the exact instant that his mobile phone camera flash fired, and some portraits of my wife
- A photo of a Citroen 2CV taken with a Lomo with around 300 views
- Over 250 views of a photo of a beer (it is a Guinness though)
- A large number of decent tourist photos with around 100 views or less
- A few experiments with infra-red and various film and developer combinations with around 100 views or less
- A large number of photos (including at least one gallery pick of the week on RFF) with hardly any views
So here is what I learned from this:
- Flickr stats are non-sensical and to be taken with a grain of salt.
- I'm sure that a cute photo of my daughter with a kitten would blow all of the above out of the water.
- Then again if I wanted to improve my stats based on the above I would travel more, and meanwhile take more photos of bikes, interesting people, cars, my wife, beers, landscapes, cityscapes, street photos, etc. mostly favouring obscure cameras and different film-developer combinations.
Hmmmm, maybe I'm on to something....
So what do your stats tell you?
Cheers,
Rob
I've noticed that a few recent threads have discussed the effects of the internet on photography. I know I shouldn't generalize, but they mostly revolve around the photos that formerly ended up in shoeboxes in an attic or would not have been not taken at all, and are now all over Facebook, Flickr, etc. with loads of compliments. This prompted me to take a look through my Flickr stats, and see if they contained any insights into how I might improve my photography.
Here is a quick summary of my own stats to get things started:
The "favourites" don't tell me much and the comments are mostly chit-chat with people I either know personally or through RFF.
The "views" are where things get interesting:
- 1 of a hotel dining room table with well over 3,000 views - I like the photo a lot but I have no idea why it is so popular
- 1 of a bicycle in a shop window in Singapore with over 500 views
- Some portraits with between 200 and 400 views - an interesting guy in Toronto with a weird beard who walked up to me and said "take my picture", my friend where I caught him at the exact instant that his mobile phone camera flash fired, and some portraits of my wife
- A photo of a Citroen 2CV taken with a Lomo with around 300 views
- Over 250 views of a photo of a beer (it is a Guinness though)
- A large number of decent tourist photos with around 100 views or less
- A few experiments with infra-red and various film and developer combinations with around 100 views or less
- A large number of photos (including at least one gallery pick of the week on RFF) with hardly any views
So here is what I learned from this:
- Flickr stats are non-sensical and to be taken with a grain of salt.
- I'm sure that a cute photo of my daughter with a kitten would blow all of the above out of the water.
- Then again if I wanted to improve my stats based on the above I would travel more, and meanwhile take more photos of bikes, interesting people, cars, my wife, beers, landscapes, cityscapes, street photos, etc. mostly favouring obscure cameras and different film-developer combinations.
Hmmmm, maybe I'm on to something....
So what do your stats tell you?
Cheers,
Rob
