#11723 - Estrela 28 Originally uploaded by Tuzen
Portugal's color shows in the old neighborhoods. The morning street markets bring out crowds, and the rail cars haul them over the steep hills.
In this image i was more selective than usual with the black lines. Only my main subjects are outlined to help them pop from the busy background.
I created a free flickr account six months ago to see if I could experience all the claimed benefits. Thus far I am underwhelmed by the social aspects of the service, but my investigation continues and I still have much to learn.
The image quality at Flickr is much better than Facebook, although that is where social feedback is really happening in spite of poor resolution and color. Even organic page views are in the single digits unless you can figure out how to get featured. I will try and build out my flickr contact list and see if that helps, but if I have to work to market my work then perhaps it won't really matter what photo service I use to do that.
The best image quality is at Smugmug, and they have commerce services too; I can order prints, mugs, and cards. I am especially interested in commerce tools both for feedback and for creating incentives and rewards for great photos. Flickr has even taken some bad press for creating a tool for massive theft with their developer tools.
Photo discovery, however, is great fun. I have found hundreds of inspirational images at Flickr, although there isn't very much I can do with most of them. iStockphoto lets me buy a cheap copy for guilt-free personal use, such as here in my blog.
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