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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BackdoorArts" data-source="post: 251074" data-attributes="member: 9240">After almost 3 years on Flickr not even knowing what the heck Explore was, let alone how photos were selected to be displayed, I wound up with 2 shots in 8 days, all without tagging anything, and having next to no followers (though that has changed).  The first was a macro shot I didn't like enough to want to put it up, but my wife wanted some of her friends on a bird site to see it so I did.  I still don't like it (it was my first snowflake effort) because I know it's not representative of my best work.  The frozen bubble shot was a different story, but I put this up for me and not for the Flickr community at large.  Purely out of curiosity I did some reading on how shots are chosen and after learning how to stack the deck (i.e. what subject matter gets chosen most often, how to tag, how notes do/don't play a part, social interaction about the photo, etc.) it just made my head explode.  Heck, I suspect that the first image getting chosen had more to do with @Teerecks and I having a conversation about it in the comment section and flagging it for someone to look at.I think getting chosen is great, if only because it exposes your work to more people, and for me if there's been something cool about having some pics selected it's not about those photos but about the comments I've gotten on the rest of my shots from people who saw something in the Explore photo that they liked enough to want to check out the rest of my work - particularly when I see the quality of theirs.  But then I realize that your social interaction with other photographers on the site is something that raises your awareness level in the Explore engine and pop my own bubble.  The same thing holds for 500px when all of a sudden one of your shots goes "Popular" and all of a sudden you get a flurry of comments from all sorts of people, along with a request to check out their stuff.  I stopped caring when I started seeing the exact same spray of comments from 5 different photographers on all 3 photos that I uploaded one night, including one about how marvelous the color treatment was on a black and white.  Sorry, I should really just delete this because it's going to sound like I'm putting it all down.  I'm not.  Like I said, it's great to know that others appreciate your work, even if it's only after some set of program criteria flagged it for potential recognition. I care far more about what some people here think than what the Flickr community at large does.  But most of all it's about what I like, because that's who I do it for.  And I still am amazed when I get it right - and that anyone one else thinks I did too.  LOL</blockquote>

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