A Life of Its Own

I took this photo of Pugsly last week because I really just wanted to play with my new Nikon AF Nikkor 85mm f1.4D:

When I uploaded it to Flickr along with some other shots, it was immediately pretty popular and started earning a lot of favorites and comments. By that evening it had made it into Explore on Flickr.

A quick word about Explore is probably in order. Every day there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of uploads to Flickr. There's an algorithm in the Flickr system to chart "interestingness." That algorithm has been nicknamed "The Magic Donkey" in the Flickr-verse. No one knows quite how it's implemented, but the number and source of views, favorites and comments are taken into account. The system finds the 500 most "interesting" shots of the day and features them in the Explore feature of Flickr.

I woke up around 2 AM in the morning (too much coffee before bed...) following my posting of this shot. Lo and behold, the Flickr App on my phone was lit up like a Christmas tree. This shot of Pugsly had climbed to number 2 in Explore! Because of that, it was featured pretty prominently in Explore and web applications linked to Explore. The photo took on a life of its own and started earning me page views, comments and favorites like I've never seen. As of the time of the posting of this blog, the photo has 5600 page views, 531 favorites and 137 comments. I don't see that much activity in a week on all of my photos combined, let alone on one shot in a single day!

The photo has since fallen a little bit in Explore. It's now rated as #12 for 2/8/13. That's still better than my previous best which clocked in at #24.

What's really fun is that this wasn't my only photographic "success" of the weekend, either. A photo editor at Crain's Chicago Business contacted me and asked to use this photo for an article in their magazine:

I agreed and will be getting remunerated for my efforts and will get a copy of the magazine. This will only be the second time I've been published in a magazine, so I'm really excited about it.

Definitely some fun stuff happening this weekend!