So I currently have three pictures kicking around the Flickr "Judge Me" groups, trying to glean some sort of information about taste and what is and isn't visually interesting to people, and maybe find something broader about the level of Flickr in general. I am also fishing for compliments. This is also bad science of small sample size. I chose images that I was not particularly fond of, but some people seemed to enjoy; They had a goodly number of views to start.
This is the first one I entered in the
Score Me! group, and you can see from the comments and grades that there's a sharp curve between initial thoughts and those that come after (scores run 8, 7.5, 6 and 5 in that order). There was then a comment suggesting that I post this image on the
Ultimate Score Me group, which I did. Aside from the clunky posting code that requires multiple cuts and pastes, the "Of 5" scoring scale means the difference between an American School "B" grade and "D" grade photo is one point. Scores for this group run 3 (D), 3 (D), 3 (D), 4 (B), 5 (A) in order. Wither the outliers?
I entered this in because it was old, and was obviously black and white and obviously off-centered and inelegant... I thought it was graphically interesting more than anything. Two of the comments mentioned the framing being off-putting (4/10 and 6/10), one claimed it 'doesn't do anything for' him (3/10), one didn't know what to think of it at all (5.5/10). There was one additional vote with no comment of 3/10. So my initial thoughts are numerically confirmed by outsiders.
My polaroids are popular. I know this, thank you. Mr. Sea Lion was in the 8's all the way down (8.5, 8, 8, 8, 8) and is probably the most pretty of the three, and the most obvious at the same time. Some of the limits of this series are:
1) The fixed minimum distance from the subject (there's a glass window, obviously).
2) The nature of the film (which sometimes forces me to work at the fixed minimum distance to get acceptable results).
3) The fixed focal length of the lens (Holga, yo).
4) The staging of the subject (the Museum is designed to provide maximum viewage of a static object).
These all add up to images that are essentially portraits and a portrait is classically considered to be an image representative of the subject, and the result can be a little didactic. Understanding the American School scale of A through F, we can say that 5/5 people found this picture a "B", and in my logic, effectively representative of the thing that it is.
My next thoughts lie with the viewers themselves, and this is where things get tricky in a Glass House + Stones way. Some pissy comments on the group pages point out the people who seem to cut 'n' paste their scores straight across, the people who seem to score out of perceived meanness or revenge, and the people who are angry that they got an honest score and thought more highly of themselves than they should have.
The first two sets of comments are correct in their anger, the last is not, obviously -- you don't just throw pictures out there figuring that everyone to love them. But what can be determined is your audience. The people that offer the highest scores to a given picture tent to have favorited similar styles of picture and the converse is true as well.
Apropos of nothing, and certainly not a conclusion:
Some observations include the caste system within Flickr itself: the most popular kids are traditionally pretty (landscapes, well-timed portraits, people who post their model tests and etc), the arty kids have their own little group (the people doing stuff with polaroids or x-processing tend to have the same postings to the same groups and the same taste in subject mater) and there's a whole bunch of people who just want to see pictures of babies and their friends (or their dogs).
Labels: black and white, flickr, judgement, polaroid, polls, science, self-promotion, shame, stupid people, whining
