I know ‘likes’ on Social Media isn’t the best measure of how good an image is, but recently I’ve been sharing some of my images on a variety of groups/platforms and the responses have been quite interesting.
I took this photograph two years ago with my Nikon D300, I hadn’t had the camera more than a couple of months, I was still learning how to use it. I had inherited the camera and luckily some lens and books from a late friend who had lost his battle with cancer.
Having been a Canon shooter in recent years it was a bit of a challenge learning how to use the Nikon. There’s no better way to learn than by using the camera.
I went on a bit of a tour around my local town of Thouars, France and I discovered a narrow path leading down to the river, carefully avoiding nettles and other undergrowth, I managed to take this photograph.
Apart from the white van, I am quite pleased with the image, it really has quite a ‘wow’ factor to it. Well I think so.
I’ve shared it in a few places with the usual moderate number of ‘likes’ and comments.
The other day a ‘suggested group’ popped up in my Facebook feed for a group sharing local landscape images. I took a look through the group and liked what I was seeing. There was some very high quality images of local scenes and I thought I would contribute some of my own images to the group.
The group was made up with about 99% French speakers, so I duly worked out what I wanted to say in French and posted the image above.
What happened over the next few days was crazy, or bizarre as we say in French. Every time I opened Facebook more likes and comments on this one image.
To date is has nearly 550 likes and 40 comments. I was knocked out by the reaction. Being new to the group I wondered if this was normal. Looking at other images in the group the ‘good’ ones seem to get about 50-60 likes, mine knocked it out of the park!
A few days later I tried posting another image of a recent hot air ballon event, but that wasn’t so popular. OK let’s try another local scene. That also proved popular with about 130 likes, this one was a bit of a mystery as to where it was in the town, so it had lots of comments trying to work out the location, which people seem to enjoy doing.
Having learn’t what is popular in the group I’ve been going through my image library going back over the years we have lived/visited here and I share an image each week. It has been quite satisfying seeing the reactions to my photos and also good for my French language learning too!
It has inspired me to go out and take more local photographs around the town, there’s no need to travel a long way, park the car and just take a walk, it is good exercise too and even if I’ve photographed it before, I try to use these photo walks to try different things to improve on what I have done before.
Remember there are no bad cameras….
That's so wonderful Steve! Congrats and yes, sharing is truly inspiring so keep doing it. No bad cameras <3