File this one under the power of the internet… also the day that Ryan Yoder’s silhouette became famous.
Let me start by saying that I hadn’t intended on making this photo a Picture of the Week photo, not because I don’t like it, but because I took it as more of a joke. My friend Ryan and I had decided to brave the cold and go do some night photography in Cades Cove while there was still snow hanging around. We had been trying different angles on Sparks Lane and Ryan was finishing up a shot while I was getting set up for another one. I took a test shot and noticed that I could see him in it, so I took another one, this time asking him to turn on his red headlamp on for a second because I thought it would be funny. Thus… this shot.
However, if there was ever a “picture of the week”… or month… or year… this one was it; I’ll explain. When I got home that night I went through my photos and found this one and posted it to Flickr just as a goof. Now, at this point I should tell you that on average, my photos get about 100 total views a day. If I participate in a Twitter chat about photography I may get between 300 – 400 views. Every great once in a while, someone will stumble on my photostream and I’ll end up with a 1,000 or so views for the day. That happens maybe once every 2 months. Now, those aren’t stellar numbers, but considering that I’d never get CLOSE to those numbers if I did some sort of gallery showing or just hung them on the walls of my house, I’m happy with them. Then… this happened:
That’s 17,317 views… in a single day. I’m not sure I got that many views the first YEAR I was on Flickr. What happened? Well, Flickr does this thing called Explore, where they post a selection of pictures posted that day to their main site. Literally everyone who logs into Flickr sees a small collection of them on their screen and you can click that to see the rest for the day. Well… this picture was selected, for whatever reason, and the rest is just a display of the power of the internet. The picture itself got a total of 6,449 views and 117 favorites in a single day and the rest were from people just browsing other pictures in my stream. Pretty crazy huh?
Tune in next week for the picture I was actually there to take. Holly says she prefers this image… I like next week’s better. You can weigh in if you like.
–Dan Thompson