Back in the day, I used to get roughly one of my photos per month into Flickr’s Explore – the top 500 most “interesting” photos posted on the site on any given day. But the rate petered off and now I’ve had a drought that’s lasted almost two years – my last Explored photo was back in September, 2009.

I figure it’s because Flickr has grown rapidly. There are more people uploading more photos, and that just makes it harder to attract enough attention to get a photo into the top 500 of an ever-expanding sample size.

But I was pleasantly surprised to see a raft of comments and likes on this photo, which I posted a couple of days ago. This is a shot of Leon Dormido (“Sleeping Lion”), a volcanic rock spire sticking out of the ocean a few kilometres off the coast of San Cristóbal Island in the Galapagos. It’s a nesting site for blue-footed boobies and magnificent frigatebirds. We circled the rock in our boat a couple of times at dawn to see the frigatebirds in their courtship displays – there’s no landing place on the rock. This shot is as we were leaving it behind, our last encounter with wildlife in the Galapagos. To me there’s that element of sadness in this image – something I guess nobody else picks up just from looking at it. Still, I’m very pleased with how this photo turned out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, 15 June, 2011 at 18:52 and is filed under Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.