Well, I guess it figures. I’ve had a Flickr Pro account for almost a year. I got it mostly so I don’t have to fill family and friends’ Inboxes with attachments, and it’s only lately that I’ve even had much activity on my images. Might have something to do with the fact that I’d never registered for any groups until (I think) last March. I mean “last March” as in “last month”, when I finally broke down and registered for an S3 IS group and an S3 IS macro group. The only one I actually submitted to was the macro group, but whatever. The point is that I’ve got more contacts now and a few more people are seeing my pictures. I guess I don’t really care, but on some level, it’s sort of nice to not feel like I’m the only one who thinks the ones I posted don’t suck.

Anyway, I’ve put up lots of pictures. Some of them not too bad, if I do say so myself. I try to pay attention to the colours and get a shot balanced without making it look too “rigid”. I’m not a photographer and don’t care about being one, but I do love to take pictures of things that interest me or things I think are pretty. My better ones end up on Flickr. Lots of them are aquarium pictures. Lots of them are fish pictures. Some of them are even Ubie pictures, since he’s never once met a lens he didn’t like.

So when I finally do make Explore, what picture does it? Is it one of the ones with which I’m pleased because I fiddled about with manual settings and used available light to my advantage so I wouldn’t have ugly “flatness” from the flash? Nope. One that’s particularly creative? As if–I don’t possess a creative bone in my body! How about a fish picture of a particularly pretty betta boy? Uh-uh. No, the picture that makes Explore is one of the set I took of Ubie, the guy I bought because he was a homely little leftover that I doubted would get a home, and he’s terrorising his scruffy old brown ramshorn snail with his mouth in a most unflattering position. His tank light was off, the room was dim and all I had time to do was run for the camera, set it on Auto, poke the Macro button and flip up the flash. The original had specks of paper towel lint, but I still didn’t bother to use Photoshop; all I did was remove the worst of the specks with the clone stamp in GIMP and boost the blue up a bit in the midtones because the poor lighting made Ubie’s colour look more yellow than it is in real life. I put it there mostly to show a couple of friends whom I thought would find it amusing. Yup, the full-auto snapshot taken with the flash and edited in GIMP is the one that made Explore. Go figure.