Sharing Pics; A million hits

It has been amazing to see the on-going use of the pics I have uploaded to Flickr. When I began building boats it was quite a recent thing- to share images- and I was fortunate enough to spend many hours gleaning ideas, inspiration and techniques from generous people all over the world.

So during my builds it seemed like a sensible thing to annotate some pictures and share them. The albums have remained mostly unchanged since then, but this week it gave me an unreasonable amount of pleasure to see the total views of these albums go beyond one million hits.

The two most popular albums are of two very different boats, The Waller 540, a speedy, modern sloop, and the Navigator, a traditional looking planing hull with wooden spars. It is quite interesting that often if there has been a lot of interest in one boat on a given day, the following day someone else will be looking at the other boat.

Over the years now I have had some great contact from a selection of these builders, and have had some further input into their project. Occasionally they send pictures of their efforts and I have really enjoyed that, and the thought that by collaborating within a network of interested people, sharing skills freely and with no financial reward we are fostering creativity and personal growth internationally.

In this time of internet everything, one million hits is nothing to get excited about, but for me, given how particular this interest is, and how unusual it is in the modern world for people to build small wooden boats, it remains evidence that in a greedy, sometimes corrupt and sometimes angry dangerous world there is some goodness, freely shared.

In the Picture

 Over the week-end I had the pleasure of a visit from a Melbourne Navigator builder and his friend, who came to see Annie, and to chat about the progress of his build- it is roughly at the stage shown in these pics from Annie's Flickr set. I'm hoping that our boats might sail together one day.

Reflecting on some of his comments made me realise how powerful  photo sharing sites like Flickr are in  very real and practical ways. Making something like a boat is a transitory experience that involves lots of imagining and tricks and mind games to stay motivated. It also presents a lot of small problems to be solved in your own particular way. Amateur builders are nearly always going about these things in a context of family or career or local issues of space or money- very few have the perfect budget, endless time and ideal spaces and tools.

So for most of us the process passes, the boat is built and  then enjoyed, but the building becomes something from a time before, and just an experience to be remembered- unless the story of the build is recorded and shared. The ability to add notation and comments to the photos takes the process to an even more powerful level, as do the little interactions that inevitably occur between fellow photo-sharers who keep an eye on each other's progress.

I looked at my Flickr statistics to-day and found that although I only have a few sets of any interest, there have been an astonishing 145,000 (now in 2016 there are more than 1.3 million hits. ed.) hits, increasing some days by as many as 600 views. This absolutely dwarfs any interest shown in this blog, which is interesting because it tells me quite clearly that people are rightly much more interested in what we do than the things we say. I find this a bit ironic or perhaps revealing, because I struggle much more to say something coherent than I do to make something!

I'm sure I could stop blogging to-day without causing much concern to anyone, but the Flickr photos will be of use as long as I keep them up there because they allow us to understand a difficult process visually, and to reassure ourselves that if something can be done by someone else, we can do it too.

My Flickr sets