bikes and things

I wrote a little while back about how one of my photos went a little bit crazy on Flickr. It was a misty iPhone shot and it got over 9000 views in a day. I thought that was pretty good at the time. I also commented at the time about how it was almost inconceivable a few years back for me that an iPhone shot would be uploaded to Flickr by me.

Now it’s not me saying I’m amazing, I’m not, and this was just a shot of some mist and being there at the right time. What does surprise me is that quality of the camera in the iPhone and how much I didn’t actually miss my proper camera.

So since that I’d had another shot be quite popular – another snap I’d taken whilst waiting at a set of traffic lights in the car – with the handbrake on obviously and not breaking the law for a photo.

It was reasonably popular on Instagram so popped it onto Flickr whilst bored in the post office queue or something. It’s the same kind of thing – iPhone + VSCO + right time = popular photo. That got 60+ favourites and 9000+ views.

So again I was bored and thought I’d add something to my Flickr page. There’s a need to keep it fresh and I hadn’t sat down to edit any photos for a while. So I chucked this one up and went to bed.

I mean this really is a snap in every sense of the word. When I uploaded the square version of this to Instagram I cropped out my friend from the left. It’s also quite badly composed.

I didn’t add to any groups or try and draw any traffic to it at all. It then went stupidly crazy. As of checking now it’s had of 71,000 views and 270 favourites! It went to the top of explore and stayed there all day which is completely bonkers. Just to re-iterate my original point, I’m not blowing my own trumpet. This is a very average shot I’m just intrigued by what is popular on any given day and how things rise up in Flickr’s Explore page.

This is my stats graph for the day after it got into Explore.

Two days worth of 50k+ views on that picture and the rest of my stream. That’s nuts. I had to turn notifications off as my phone was buzzing all the time. And to prove it all here’s it’s position on the Explore page and what else was interesting. The other thing is that my three most viewed photos are now all iPhone shots which again is madness in my mind considering what I used to think of phone shots.