FLICKER AND SHINE

Dick Pountain/15 May 2006/09:19/Idealog 142

I've been using the Internet every day since 1985, back when there was only a command line interface and no graphics. I've been using conferencing systems to communicate with colleagues every day since 1990 - Byte Magazine was the first  customer for Waterloo University's CoSy system (later used as the basis for Cix). I've been using search engines since the early days of Excite, Lycos, Altavista and Inktomi. And yet it's taken until now for anything on the Web to really hook me, and that thing is Flickr.

I have RWC graphics columnist Tom Arah to thank for my addiction (thanks Tom!) His description of Flickr a couple of issues ago interested me enough to register and try it out, and it almost immediately sank its claws into me. Tom, as a designer and user of pictures quite rightly stressed its importance as a huge reservoir of public domain and CC images, but what grabbed me as a casual photographer was the huge potential audience (or should that be 'vidience'?), the community structure and the fact that it employs a metric, namely 'views', to rate how much your pictures appeal to others.

I've been into photography for years, even occasionally had pictures published, but once I'd satisfied my lust for an Olympus OM-1 in the early '70s I grew out of hardware fetishism, and the accumulation of unseen negatives eventually became a bore. Digital briefly revived my interest (at least unviewed files on a hard disk are cheaper than film and paper). Now Flickr lets me dig up those pictures I think are worthwhile and run them up a virtual flagpole to see if anyone salutes.

As you visit Flickr for the first time (www.Flickr.com) you'll almost certainly decide that it's just a big mess of people's holiday snaps. You may notice that the average technical quality, if not the composition, of most pictures is quite good because modern digital cameras make wrong exposure and focus almost impossible. It takes a while to grasp how vast the database is, and how good the navigation is thanks to groups and tagging. Eventually you may find your way around and stumble upon some great images.

The cleverness of Flickr's designers lies in grafting a simple rating system (via view counts, comments and favourites) on top of a date-based streaming system. As you upload more pictures they're always displayed most-recent-first. That means your pictures get gradually pushed down each group's list, so you have a limited period - perhaps just a day - to get people to notice them before they're swept away in the stream. You do that by informative tagging and finding those groups to post to who might be interested in that particular subject. It all becomes a marvellous game, a bit like one of those stock market simulations, but where you're trying to maximise your number of views.

If you *are* a hardware fetishist there are plenty of groups who like to talk the big lens talk. If you prefer arty waffle, or mysticism, or gritty realist reportage, there are hundreds of groups for those too. Just like eBay, or MySpace, or the blogosphere, it's a sizeable world with diverse factions and philosophies. The blogosphere never hooked me because I've never enjoyed arguing for the sake of it (and nasty opinions are far more distasteful than crap photographs). There's a more philosophical reason too: photographs, however personal, or silly, or badly framed, always show a little bit of the real world at some other place where you're not. Bad opinions just reveal a little bit of the inside of someone else's head, where you would never want to be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who believe that the camera never lies, or that you mustn't ever crop a photograph because that would be messing with the truth. The truth (as I believe I've said here before) is everything that happens in the world of matter, of which we see, feel, taste, smell and imagine only those tiny local samples of surface appearance that our narrowband senses can take in. A camera is no different - it neither lies nor tells the truth but just says what came in through that lens, there, then,  under that illumination. I have no compunction at all about buffing up my pictures in Paintshop Pro, tweaking everything from brightness and contrast to hue and saturation until I like what I see. I'm really in it for the psycho-geography, the way certain places make you feel a certain way. A picture of a place is never the same as being there, but you can tweak it until hopefully it might convey a little of the same feeling.

We've known for ages that the human brain contains dedicated circuitry for recognising faces, of great evolutionary survival value for recognising kin and telling friend from foe. I'm coming to believe it may have a similar facility for landscape, which would also have survival value in finding your way home. (Furthermore, I'd bet that it activates oxytocin, the hormone that produces bonding behaviour). Bisected sheep and sharks are all very well, but it's still portraits and landscapes that hold most people's affections. You can see the landscape that currently fills my imagination on Flickr under dick_pountain...