I’ve always had a sweet spot for Photography. It stirs things in me, much more than other visual art forms and from a creative perspective - and bear with me here - it has a very low entry barrier level, in fact, increasingly low as everyone has at least one camera on their pocket, even if they use the front facing one more often than they should :)
Plus, like other art forms, you can play your strengths anyway you want, some people have great framing, others a keen eye for lighting, others play their social strengths and produce amazing insights into human expressions and behaviors, others are technically gifted and work their magic on post-production and others are simply lucky and that’s fine .
So, I like Photography, both as a producer and as a spectator and that’s what we’re here to talk about today. On January 4th 2011 I started a Tumblr to expose other people’s work that touched a nerve or two with me - I’m great with names, so I called it Things David Likes - TDL for short - , because … it’s things .. that I .. liked, so I totally nailed that.
As you can see below, the first few years were slow going, I was mostly learning and discovering people to follow, namely on Instagram and Flickr, so the number of posts was low and with limited variety and over the years it grew slowly, up until last year where things took off. So much in fact that I changed my publishing approach, from pushing directly to the blog to creating a queue and only pushing a few posts live as not to be annoying.
| Year | # Posts | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 56 | 55 |
| 2012 | 97 | 9 |
| 2013 | 299 | 66 |
| 2014 | 822 | 442 |
| 2015 | 5730 | 18864 |
Last year I also bought the .com domain, mostly because I felt the project was now going on for long enough to deserve something, small of a token as it may be, and I also created the Facebook Page. This was more of a learning experiment, both to see how much I could take out of Facebook than anything. I’ve sort of created a daily highlight where I change the page Header with the best picture of the day before and I try to like / share some posts to gauge the effect. I also spent some 15€ in Ads to get some initial traction and try that out as well, but so far - and it might be early days anyway - engagement is pretty flat, out of the 93 people who followed 5 are very moderately active and I’m one of them, so clearly, I have a lot of ways to go.
Finally, my goal is two fold, for one I really enjoy Photography and TDL ends up being an outlet for me as taste is also a personal exercise and a bit of who I am and I want to share that part of me. The other motivation is that I really like some of these pictures and I really admire a lot of people for their abilities and in my own - not always strictly license compliant way, although I try to find the Creative Common ones out there - way, this is how I pay homage to these folk and try to drive other people to them.
I hope you enjoy it, do reach out with Flickr / Instagram accounts you really like and think I would to, as I’m always looking to diversify and we can’t really trust the Explore / Popular pages as they don’t always reflect quality.