Hello 2013, and good news

Just stopping in while in the midst of a complicated move to a new apartment (my first since 2001!) to share three things:

My main Flickr account hit 2 million all-time views. These things are always fun to watch for, but I missed seeing an exact 2,000,000...in fact I missed noticing at all for a while. Presumably happened last Saturday night/Sunday when I was moving stuff. Thanks to anyone who's been a part of this.

I made it to 2 million views (and five years on Flickr, and some other stats too arcane to tell you about) without reaching a number of milestones for my photography I won't get into now. But then suddenly I hit one--the first actual feature of my work anywhere!

My friend Jason--who's largely responsible for getting me on Flickr in the first place, as I joined the day after my birthday (when I'd talked about it with him at dinner)--put together this attractive piece on my work the past couple years photographing shopping malls. I'm the second in a new weekly feature on photographers. I answered a few questions, talking about some of the things I've observed, but didn't try to make a big statement about the decline of malls or anything.

You can go directly to the feature here or via this post at the CCLaP site, read a little more and choose a PDF version if you'd prefer. Also, KoHoSo on Tumblr put up this nice piece about it and my work.

The CCLaP piece includes dead malls in the Chicago area, Gary, Indianapolis, Madison, Omaha (and a few shots not technically from deadmalls but I guess they fit well). Also, this prompted me to do a lot of work organizing my Flickr photos, sets, and collections, and there's now a retail collection for stores and shopping malls, a set for all my shopping mall photos, and many individual sets for malls, most recently, the very dead Euclid Square Mall in Euclid, Ohio, and Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles, IL.

And since I missed coming by to promote this, I also made it into the Chicago Reader's annual Photo Issue (along with some fine people I know from Flickr/elsewhere). I have two photos in the online version and the houses/mattresses one made it into the print version.

Back soon when things are less hectic. Thank you again to anyone who's supported my work, and big things are on the way...I hope.

the return (and post 200)

I have returned from the Missouri-Kansas trip; now to get the 1000-some photos onto my computer. And enjoy the other things I've brought back: half a variety 12-pack of Boulevard beer, winter hats from both home sports teams I saw play on the trip, books retired from the Boonslick Public Library collection, cheap postcards from gas stations (many still showing the old Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis), locally made candies, an out-of-print 1970s book on hobos and trains, etc. Here's a quick photo from, I believe, Higginsville, MO, where I got pumpkin-flavored coffee at the gas station. (After pumpkin beer in Boonville and before pumpkin pancakes in Independence.)

Blogger is telling me this is my 200th post on City of Destiny, and since I've spent National Blog Writing Month talking about discovering Blogger stats, and hitting 200,000 photostream views and 1,500,000 overall views on Flickr, I suppose I need to point this out too. ("All I have are my pageviews!" I told my traveling companion, half-kidding, before leaving St. Louis.) I'll assume that means posts that are actually posted (there may be some drafts floating around). As with the Blogger stats, that seems quite low for having been on here in one form since 2005 and another form since 2007. But this trip was an escape from the negativity about my creative output I've been bogged down in recently, so I'd better not dwell on that, and think about how it might be possible for me to hit 500 by the end of 2012...As before, thank you for anyone who's read and supported this blog!

Flickr again

So, a three-part Megabus trip I just took would have gotten a glowing review from me, but a confusing situation on the last bus made us get in well over an hour late, and posting a whole new piece or even choosing a photo is too much right now, so here's a photo I really like that I put on Flickr:

Taken last Sunday, near a school demolition site. That photo was at the top of my Flickr page when it hit this on 11/9/11:

1.5 million overall views. Again, thank you to all who've appreciated my work on Flickr, even the several commenters who've frankly been annoying me recently in various ways and I should really say something. And the people I haven't heard enough from recently. I could tell, checking on the Detroit hostel computer last night, I'd almost certainly miss seeing it EXACTLY at 1.5. But hey...the 201,234 I see above is kind of neat.

briefly noted

200,000! Thank you to all my viewers and supporters! I'm sure I'm not the only Flickr user who likes seeing nice round numbers. I average about 50,000 photostream views per year (it's slowed down, which seemed wrong, since I keep getting more PEOPLE [or sometimes bots] viewing, but then it really sunk in that I post 2-5 photos a day average, when I used to do 8-12...and you would not believe the backlog I have) so I knew I'd be hitting this in the fall. Got up a few hours after waking up today and to my delight it was at 199,999. Of course that means it inexplicably takes forever for ONE person to bump it over to 200,000, but it happened, and I got screenshots.

When I neared 100,000 views, I was on a trip to a Boston-area friend, needing to leave soon to get my bus back to Chicago, and I was so anxious to see the round 100,000 I had to sign myself out of Flickr, view my account to get the right number of views, and sign back in to see 100,000 on the screen, so I could save the image. (Probably via an actual photo of the screen, since I still don't know how to do screenshots on non-Macs.)

And: the number of photos it shows is extremely different from the number I actually have posted. Disregard. And also: getting very close to 1,500,000 of ALL types of views on my account all-time, but I'm not counting on being at the computer when that happens.