You Just Never Know

I've had an account with flickr now for almost a year. I know this because I got my notice to renew a few days ago. This site stores all my pictures, either scanned or digital, along with video clips. It has an interesting feature that allows you to track, in a general sort of way, the hits you get on your pictures.

It's interesting... what other people find interesting.

For example, one of the pictures that got the biggest hits over time was a picture of my grandmother standing in her dining room in Sidney, Nebraska. For the longest time, I thought people were really perverted, because the picture was named Dad-21, as it was the 21st picture in a series that I uploaded at one time. But when I changed the title to something else, the hits kept coming.

Well, I looked up the statistics for the hit, and as it turns out, the most viewers came from one site: brace.net. The rest came from a blog on this same site, called Back Neck Braces Blog. If you look at the sidebar, where the pictures change, you'll see my grandmother sitting with my dad, winking at the camera. See, my grandmother died of cancer, and in the last years of her life had to wear a back brace.

I guess people aren't always as bad as you think.

It turns out that another couple of my pictures have made it onto another site. It's called StormPulse. In 1979, we lived in Coosawhatchie, South Carolina. 1979 was also the year Hurricane David hit on the Atlantic side of the southeastern U.S. I had three old pictures dad had taken of the damage to our property. And now, you can see them displayed on StormPulse. I have to say, our pictures look pretty tame, next to the picture of the huge tree crushing a schoolbus.

You just never know what people are going to find interesting.

Yesterday afternoon, I was talking to co-workers in my office. One has a freshman in college, and he recently had an assignment to visit a historic site in Georgia and write a report on it. He chose Warm Springs, GA, site of "the little white house" where FDR did his convalescence. The problem was that the assignment asked for a Civil War era historical site. Something significant prior to 1870.

Well! It turns out, I had just been to New Manchester Mill, located within the boundaries of Sweetwater Creek S.P. I had pictures, not just of the mill, but of the plaques which described the workings of the mill. I downloaded them and emailed them, and he was able to do his report from that material alone, then ask the professor if she'd understand that he did the work, but would go to the site that weekend. She agreed.

I got a bottle of wine out of it from a delighted mother. And a nice compliment about one of the pictures I took of the mill.

The bottle was certainly a nice gesture, but the compliment made my day. She asked if photography was my hobby. I was tempted to show her all the pictures I've become proud of. For example, my duck. Or my duck dancing. Or my duck walking like an Egyptian.

Here I am, a big girl with a bad back and sore knees, who can't quite feel her legs right now after running the "personal trainer" program on the gym's elliptical for a half hour, and I'm grinning from ear to ear because, in my possession, taken by my own hand, I have a picture of a duck.

You just never know what will interest people.

--Laura