A few weeks ago I started posting photos on Flickr in earnest, and by now there are 931 pictures and counting on my account.
One of the fun things about having your photos on this site compared to other photo hosting & printing websites I've used like Shutterfly is being able to see statistics on which of one's shots other people click on. There's much more of a public viewing aspect to Flickr, it seems. I don't necessarily put a lot of stock in the relative quality of the shots chosen versus others on view, because a lot of this is based on people clicking thumbnail images; what's compelling in a thumbnail might not always be the most compelling photograph overall.
That said, it's still fun to sift through the photos according to clicks. Although the numbers are changing all the time, following are the top 10 shots from my Flickr account.
This was a shot I took in June of this year inside Memorial Coliseum at the Rose Parade. I wasn't interested in the parade so much as the opportunity to see the Coliseum with its curtain open, exposing the view through glass-enclosed building to the skyline of Portland outside.
This is another shot of Memorial Coliseum, taken in April of this year just after an open house with mayor Sam Adams in which Coliseum supporters loudly roared their support for the building, a turning point against the plan to demolish the building.
One of numerous shots I took inside the Forbidden City in Beijing while visiting the city in November 2007 on a press tour for a new art museum opening, the Ullens Center.
I wouldn't have necessarily thought of this as a standout photo, or enough of one to be the 4th rated among over 900. Perhaps the people who find and recognize my name on Flickr, or who otherwise come to my page there through various Twitter/Facebook postings I've sometimes made about new photos being added, are skewed more towards Portlanders. Besides, South Waterfront is also rather interesting, I think, as a new urban neighborhood that began from scratch on a brownfield site just a few years ago, at the height of the real estate boom, and now are struggling to stitch together a sense of community and fill out the empty units there.
This is one of several photo prints I scanned recently from the thousands of pre-digital camera photos I have in albums. I have lots of negatives, but only a fraction of the overall collection. This picture was taken on a very special day in October of 1996. It's taken from a promenade in Brooklyn Heights, where I was on a stroll with Valarie and her parents, who were visiting from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania that day. (Valarie and I lived in New York at the time.) Not only can you see the World Trade Center prominently in the background, but later that night after this shot was taken, I was at Yankee Stadium to see Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Wade Boggs, Paul O'Neill and company win the World Series.
This was taken in Beijing on the same 2007 trip as the above shot of the Forbidden City. The picture was shot from the entrance to the China Today art museum.
While on my first trip to Japan in 2004, I encountered this pair of good-natured tour guides at a Shinto shrine in the Tokyo district of Asakusa.
This is a shot of the Prada store in Tokyo's exclusive Omotesando shopping area. It was designed by one of my favorite architecture firms in the world, Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland. They also designed the Bird's Nest olympic stadium in Beijing and Tate Modern museum in London.
Another one of my pre-digital camera photos, this is a scan of a print taken in about 1995, when I was finishing up my studies at New York University. As you can see, the World Trade Center is again visible in the background. And as it happens, Valarie used to live on this block, which is particularly a coincidence because when I took the picture we hadn't yet met.
This is another shot taken inside Memorial Coliseum during June's Rose Parade. One of the compelling features of the building is how the seating bowl sits completely free standing from the rest of the building, although some extra structural bracing was added in an ill-advised restoration.
Again, I don't necessarily think these are my 10 best photos. Not at all. The exterior shot of the Coliseum is a little bit blurry, and I think the Prada store shot is only interesting because the building is interesting, not because of any expert photography. Even so, it's fun to see what people have been clicking on.
