Wisdom of crowds ?

A book I’m currently reading (by Alain Briot) recommends an exercise where you create a set of photos, rate them yourself, and then ask other people to rate them. He says you should be prepared to be surprised by the results.


Well, although Briot intends that prints should be used, I have had an interesting experience on Flickr.. This photo, from Lake Lugano, I only really uploaded just because it was there. In my opinion, it is pretty weak. It is one taken over a period of one hour, on a very cold morning, from a location I’ve vsited before. I actually took a whole series, and this was one of the last. The earlier ones were, in my opinion, far better, but because I made the bloody stupid mistake of not checking the ISO, which was set at 3200, and was not even awake enough to realise why I was getting such relatively short exposure times, the first 45 minutes or so were a waste of time.

So this, I think, is one of my weakest photos on Flickr, as well as being the weakest from this area. And yet… it is so far, and by quite a wide margin, the most popular and highly rated photo in my photostream.

Even in terms of location, in my opinion, either of these, taken 3-5 years ago, are better.

Maybe I should not have posted the photo if I was not particularly happy with it. But then again, people like it! There must be a lesson in there somewhere….