Phototastic

It's Day 2 of 2008, which means it's also Day 2 of the Grand Photo Experiment of 2008. Ever since my tentative first post about my plan to take a photo a day this year, I've been overwhelmed by the support and excitement coming out of the digital woodwork. Nickd suggested that I try Flickr on for size; Phil totally rocked my world by deciding to come along for the ride with his own daily photos. By all accounts, 2008 is set to be the most phototastic year on record.

Some thoughts so far:

First of all, I actually already had a Flickr account [galactisupersleuth]. However, it had long lain dormant, gathering pixel dust as I poured my meager photostreams into Facebook. There's something to be said for putting photos on Facebook. Mainly, all your friends will definitely see them; also, the geek in me can't get over the beautiful efficiency of distributing relevant photos through people-tagging. (I can immediately fan out group photos to all my friends just by tagging them appropriately! So long, cumbersome emailing of photographs!)

But Flickr serves a different purpose—and actually, kind of an even more exciting one. On Flickr, it's just not about distributing photos to your friends; it's about distributing photos to everybody ever. Geotagging is especially out of control. I mean, within seconds I had digitally pinned a photograph of an outdoor clock to the exact street corner where the shot was taken. That. Is so cool. Also, Flickr's way less of a walled garden, which means I can do things like pump photos into the little widget you see to your right. Its ultranice API has begotten an incredibly rich ecosystem of add-ons and integrations, and it's just basically a joy to use. I'm sold.

Outdoor clock on Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA.

Second: I love looking at the world through a photographer's eyes. That is to say: they're my eyes, except better. Walking through the streets of Cambridge, looking for shards of beautiful things—that's pretty much exactly how I want to be living my live. Still not doing so great on the whole "taking pictures with people in them" thing (the fire hydrant's siren song is still going strong!), but I feel like that will become less of a problem once kids start flooding back onto campus for finals.

The immortal fire hydrant, from way back in May.

Third: I like my camera a lot. But you know what I would like even better? This camera.

I'm just saying.