The Fantastic World of Flickr

This weeks agenda allowed us to dip our toes into the Flickr community.  I was not sure what to expect during this project, but I was interested to see what Flickr had to offer and it seemed that my group felt the same way.  We had a lot of fun with this project and created a twisted story about a love gone wrong.  We tried to embellish some characteristics of the horror genre, considering halloween is coming up in a couple of weeks.

The story starts out with me and Max enjoying a beautiful day at the river.  A quick change of events takes place when I find out that Max has been cheating on me, and we experience a rough break up.  Shawn is there right away to console me through the tough times and we spark up a fiery relationship quickly.  While I am using Shawn to get over the tough break up, Max uses quite a different strategy.  Max can’t quite cope with the guilt and the happiness I have found, so he decides to buy a murder weapon off the black market from Ben.  Quickly after, Max catches me alone in a secluded area and brutally stabs me to my death.  Shawn then comes to surprise me with a bouquet of flowers to find me lying dead.  As Shawn stands there in shock, you can see Max in the background ready to take out Shawn as well.

This was my first experience with Flickr and I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be.  Uploading our photo stream was easy and quick and the photo tagging was easily accessible.  The tagging is nice because it has the potential to easily share your photos with many people.  We chose just to tag our names based on whether we were in that certain picture or not.  Although thats how we tagged, you can also tag keywords, places, ect.  This allows people to use Flickr as a way to share their photography through many photostreams.  Whether photography is just an interest, a hobby, or a profession, it is a useful tool to share your photos with others.

Thanks to Flickr, people with photography hobbies have the capability to use the website as a virtual art gallery.  Photographers such as Laretta Houston and Daniel Krieger were mentioned in our reading as “Joe Schmo to pro” photographers.  This meaning that they joined Flickr as amateurs and were able to develop the techniques to become talented professional photographers.  Flickr doesn’t only allow you to share your photos on the web, but it “facilitates and speeds up the learning process” of photography by users sharing their knowledge.  Today, we usually see social networking as a waste of time and a bad habit, but Flickr offers a more productive form of networking and that is why I think it will popular website for years to come.