8 million, story of a reject
I am always surprised by people’s reaction to the photographs I share online. Only a few of my most popular photos on Flickr rank amongst my personal favorites but today I would like to talk about my most successful photograph thus far, a picture of Lake Tahoe in California:
I took this picture on a road trip with a friend of mine a few years ago in 2006, with the Canon ESO 350D camera I was using at the time. When going through the photos from this trip, I initially marked this one as a reject. However, for some unknown reason, I decided not to delete it and this was one of the best decisions I ever made. Almost four years later, in January 2010, I found this photo in my Lightroom library and decided that it wasn’t a bad shot after all, it only needed a bit of cropping and a few adjustments.
A few months after uploading it on Flickr, Google added a new feature for their search engine home page, background images. To accompany the launch, Google wanted a selection of photographs users could choose from if they did not want to upload their own and chose this photograph of Lake Tahoe (along with a few other pictures of mine.) In just a few months almost 8,000,000 visitors have clicked through the thumbnail on Google.com to the picture’s Picasa page.
This experience has taught me a very important lesson: do not delete photographs that are not obviously terrible and do not hesitate to go through old series of pictures in case you missed a good one or changed your mind. I only regret I was not able to better redirect visitors to some of my other Picasa wallpapers or to my Flickr account. Clicks conversion is a lot harder than it seems!
What about you? Have you ever taken a picture that you did not especially like but turned out to be a success?
That’s an amazing photo, don’t know how you could consider it a reject. I went to Lake Tahoe earlier this year with some friends on a road trip too, there was this awesome Hawaiian place called freshies that served the best fish tacos ever.
The policy I follow is do not delete any picture , because somewhere down the line it might make you laugh, think , or make someone smile at your cost :)
Could you post the original un-cropped/adjusted version for comparison?
I rarely delete anything. Disk space is cheap, and I consider viewers of photos to be completely unpredictable — they like photos I hate, and hate photos I like.
For me, it comes down to this: you can do photography to please other people or you can do photography to please yourself. When we’re lucky those goals overlap, but for a lot of viewers they won’t. At some point you have to pick some compromise between being popular and being true to yourself.
–xsdg
Beautiful! Yea, can you do what Jon said please :) I really want to see the before / after shots. And perhaps how you did it as a bonus :)-
I finally gave up, and preordered my first every personal camera (Nikon D7000). Waiting impatiently for it to arrive :) You are really my inspiration!
That sure was a beautifull day !