Most of the pictures I upload are private, for family and friends only, but I have published a few pics to be viewed by the public. I do enjoy taking pictures but I've never considered myself much of a photographer, and I take far fewer pictures than I should. The ones that I have released to the public are mostly shots that I consider reasonably interesting for any number of reasons. Generally they are of places I've seen and usually they don't include family members.
Imagine my surprise when I received an inquiry from McGraw-Hill this week regarding a photo I uploaded to flickr almost two years ago! The photo, included below, is one that I shot of my youngest son skateboarding at the local skate park. I was particularly proud of this shot because it was an action shot that was framed reasonably well, free of blur , and by chance, featured some graffiti art. As it turns out, the photo editor who contacted me is working on a mathematics text book and wanted to use the image as a "Unit Opener" in the book. In the interest of curiosity, I asked her about their flickr trawling practices! She informed me that
“We generally try to obtain images from stock sites, but on occasion we can't find what we need and we search elsewhere. The only thing about sites like flickr is that, on occasion, the images are not hi-res, or we never hear back from the people we contact.
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© All rights reserved ;-)
p.s. I'm still using the Canon PowerShot A300 that I used to capture this shot, it's a 3.1 megapixel point and shoot style camera. While it does the job, I've been longing for something more feature packed for some time now. Perhaps I'll get the okay to buy something more sexy now that I'm going to be a published photographer!
