The Interstellar Bounce of Flickr Explore

Oh the mysteries of having a photo appearing in the flickr explore…

The tell-tale sign is seeing a huge spike in the red dot notifications, but sometimes it’s a stream of a few folks who routinely like a bunch in a batch. But then one of them is a notice that a photo was added to the in explore group– that’s the confirmation.

The most recent was a photo I liked but am not sure why it got in- I liked the early evening light on Felix in a prairie:

Ready for Action flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

I’ve had 26 photos land in explore; ironically 6 of them are of Felix. He’s explorable! And as usual, it feels like a happy accident.

And as usual, an explored photo gets like 5000 views and a wacksock of favorites. It puffs me up. But it’s never something I aim for.

This photo was different- it did feel special at the time. Cori and I enjoy our sunset walks down the country road just out our front door. It heads due west, where we marvel at the splendorous sunsets. Tuesday was a fresh change after a few days of overcast skies, and the sun was brilliant. Looking to the north, I loved the silhouette of one of the local horses grazing atop the hill.

I thought the light was a bit gone, but noticed in my preview, as the DSLR does, it often picks out more color than my eye sees. I felt good about it. The only editing was a bit of cropping to drop the horizon, and a wee bit of histogram tweaking to boost the contrast.

I wondered too if the telephone line was a distraction, but on viewing on my computer, I really liked the frame it provided.