Playing Tag as an Adult

I'm not exactly typical. This may be true in a number of ways but I've never thought of normalcy as being particularly important. In this case, however, I'm only referring to the fact I've got over five and a half thousand photos online. To some, that may sound like a lot. Yet in actuality, digital images are easy to snap and cheap to accumulate.

It wasn't that long ago when folks had just space for 24 negatives on a roll of film. What's amazing to me is that kids are growing up with the ability to snap everything they come across in their lives. It is a situation somewhat different than trying to develop one's own rolls in a makeshift dark room and paying dearly for each release of the shutter.

I pay Flickr's annual fee which amounts to about the same as I used to drop at the drug store for double prints from a roll or two. There's a lot more traction in an image that can show up on a monitor nearly anywhere. It has been relatively easy to dump thousands of images online. The key though is organization. In Flickr, the tags one gives a photo determines the ability to quickly locate it at a later time. Each tag is like entering that single image into numerous albums. The power comes though searching. For example, I can type my own name and any keyword to find a particular picture.

Try "Dennis Hurd" and "Grand Canyon".

As well as my own stuff, Flickr becomes a valuable resource for scoping out places before visiting them. For example, we continue to refine our upcoming big trip of 2009. After a month in Sri Lanka, we make a stopover for two weeks on our return. We'll use Bangkok as a base to visit both Cambodia and Malaysia. We wanted to see if we could find pictures of Lumpini Park in Bangkok. Because of the ability of my new graphics card, I switched over from my monitor to the large LCD television. There are nearly 2,000 photos in the following slide show. Mine however have not been taken and will not be added until the end of October.