The Views Pools on flickr.com

Some people might look at my pictures, particularly those who are in the 400 views group and say, “so! Anyone can get to 400 views by climbing the Views bracket groups.” For the uninitiated, these are pools of pictures that start with 25 then go to 50, 100, and every hundred after that. The point of the group is that a photo with at least 25 views is placed in the 25 group and when it outgrows that group, it moves on to 50 and so on and so forth.

So some might think that by doing this, I would be artificially inflating the views on my pictures. In actuality this does not happen. Most of my sub-100 view pictures got to 50 views before even debuting on a Views pool. The ones above 100 got to where they were largely without the help of the Views pools.

The reason being involved in the Views pools doesn’t cause my views to go up dramatically is because, especially on the lower end, there is a lot of flooding into the pool. A lot of people can get to 25 views. Even 50 views is not too hard as my top 200 photos all sport 46 views and above. So if someone doesn’t see your photo in the group pool within a few minutes, it has dissapeared into oblivion.

So why do I participate? For me it is part game and part celebration. Being part of the views groups encourage me to look through my pool every few days and see if any of the pictures are up for promotion. Then I go through the process of promoting the picture. With the higher view groups, it is a celebration for me to say that a certain photo is part of the 400 group. I routinely view pictures in the 400 pool because most non-nude pictures have to be PRETTY DARN GOOD to get to 400 views.

So, yeah, some people have pictures with 800 or more views. In my experience on flickr, somewhere around 70% or more of them have so many views because nudes are popular for various obvious and non-obvious reasons. The others - well they’re just plain amazing pictures that DESERVE all the views they have.

For me flickr is a numbers game only in the sense that the higher the views, the more people who have seen my pictures. In other words, it’s not about bragging rights, it’s about being a proud creator of my artwork and wanting it to reach the widest audience possible. With some of my pictures, I have put a LOT of time and effort into coming up with the idea, composing the shot, fixing it up in Photoshop or even creating new scenes in Photoshop which never existed anywhere but my mind (such as the surrealism set). I want everyone in the world to be touched by those shots. Although praise is always awesome, I don’t care if some people hate it or are disturbed by it. I just want it to change them.

We are all changed by every experience, no matter how small, and I want to change everyone in some way.