I Stopped at 1,000

I unfortunately found this new fantastic feature at Blogger. It's a live feed of public images as they are posted to Blogger blogs from around the globe. I'm often moved to tears by pageants of humanity's experience like this. All of it, the tender and the grotesque, at some point of objectivity, it all melds into a single joyous weeping.

I watched for a moment or two, marveling at people's compelling random travel pictures of places I will never see in person, blurry snapshots of beloved babies, bowls of food full, and then down the line empty, gorgeous examples of really good art/photography, and sadly proud photos of really bad crafts, all of it strung like beads on digital thread. Each image important to somebody, even if it is just the old exercise bike they're are hoping to sell.

What I didn't expect was how valuable the stream of collective images turned out to be for Halfland! I had to stop the flow several times, click back and retrieve a useful image to add to the 1/2L. visual reference collection. Nice to have them. It occurs to me, and why I'm mentioning it here, is that a shared pool of images, relevant to us communally as humans, that we would have never had reason to search out or chance on otherwise, can be a momentous resource for visual projects such as this.

I'll visit it again, but limit each session to no more than 1,000* for my real life's sake! I'm going to call this technique Image Combing. *I can set the speed of the playback to pretty fast and whip through a combing session in a about 10 minutes.

If you try it I hope you'll let us know how it works for you: Blogger Play