Saturday, November 19, 2011

Week 4: Flickr

           This week dealt with the introduction of another great tool the internet has to offer, Flickr. The entire class seemed to be a bit anxious because of the lack of familiarity with this site, but by the end the results spoke for themselves. My group concluded with the story of love that turned murder. We choose this idea because of the closeness to Halloween. At the end I was very pleased with the way our story took shape.
            In the story, Max and Luke were together until Max reveals he has been cheating on Luke. Luke does not take the news lightly and quickly breaks things off with Max. On the rebound, Luke finds an extremely nice guy in Shawn and their relationship quickly takes off. However, Max has decided he can’t live with jealousy and guilt. He tells himself the only way is to kill Luke to repay her for finding another man so rapidly. While Shawn and Luke are building a heavenly duo, Max is watching their every move. He buys a murder weapon in a dark alley and waits for the right time. He catches Luke on her way to freshen up and murders her. Shawn returns with a bouquet of flowers to find his one true love dead on the ground in front of him with Max ready to claim his next victim.
            Although the story seems simplistic, there were many different tactics we had to use in order to give the story more meaning and ultimately take on the shape it did. First, we had to plan out how the story would take shape because of having to work with a limited amount of pictures. Once we had outlined the story, we had to figure out where we would have our story take place. The location was important because the different shots each needed a slightly different meaning. We were able to use different lighting venues to portray our story more effectively. We made different decisions on where to take our pictures based on where the climax was in the story. Once the pictures were all taken, I found Flickr was a very user friendly site. I did not have any issues uploading the photos or making our set. I really liked the simplicity the site employs for its operations. For the tagging, I kind of interpreted it like Facebook and just did the names of the people in each shot but now have realized the great things extensive tagging can do for a picture. Overall, the experience with Flickr was awesome and I think it is definitely a good avenue for creating user generated content. Also, like the reading pointed out, it has created the field of collaborative journalism.
            Flickr is proving to be a tool that will only expand in the future because of the things it can offer to people who use it. One major use it can have for the future is the field it created, collaborative journalism, which is defined as news reporting by a group of people. This is made easy by Flickr because you can upload photos that tell these stories like a celebrity sighting or car accident. After it is uploaded applying a tag to the photo can group it with other photos like it thus creating a story of its own. Flickr is also becoming another way people can be self-expressive.  Diyosa Carter is mentioned in the reading as a budding photographer, but is a working mom. She is able to explore her inner self by photography that she says she learned mostly from Flickr. Because this site is so user friendly people like Carter can still live their demanding life without interference. In the future, this site could become something similar to what YouTube has become for aspiring artists, a path to being famous for your photography without having to leave your everyday life. After doing this project and playing around the site, it is clear Flickr may just be the next big thing. 

No comments:

Post a Comment