PhilHydePhotos: One in a million

Saturday 14 January 2017

One in a million

Once again, I wasn't on the New Years Honours list this year.

I checked it once, and I checked it twice. No deal.

Crazy isn't it? I struggle to bring up a family, struggle to make a successful business, donate 50p to the Red Cross every now and again, but simply because I'm not a celeb I don't get the opportunity to refuse an honour from Lady Muck.

Looking at those lists reminds me of college exams. Every year I'd spend 2 horrendous weeks with 6 hour a day written papers and oral exams in front of a group of patronising dick-heads. After that, they would post a list.

Those with honours at the top.

Then those who passed.

Then those who failed one part of the five or so parts. These people would have to re-sit that part.

For those who failed and had to re-sit the whole bloody thing; nothing.

Not on the list.

Total nothingness.

Imagine reading through those 70 names looking for your own. And it's not there...

Nearly every bloody year I went through that. The stuff of nightmares. Literally the stuff of nightmares. I was still having those nightmares more than twenty years later.

Well, I do get the occasional success, and yesterday just such an event happened.

I posted this photo onto the photo website flickr:

and guess what? It took me past a million views of the photos that I've posted over the last nearly 5 years.

Amazing huh?

Here's the evidence:

Well, maybe not so amazing.

There are ways and means of bumping up your numbers. Some find a type of photo that's popular, and then repeat almost exactly the same thing ad nauseum. With luck, you can get your picture on 'Explore' which assures loads of views. I used to regularly get those, but it has become more difficult of late because of the hoards of people posting on flickr

A couple of years ago, I posted lots of photos from a trip to Tanzania. I knew they would get picked. They didn't. Thus I tried experimenting and got success with this photo.