Many mornings before I go to work, I will see a view that begs to be captured, the image that starts my day. I post these morning photos on Facebook, with perhaps a wistful comment about my day-job cutting short my enjoyment of the scene. This was the image I shot yesterday, the dock at the public boat launch in my village, Point Washington, Florida. The view looks out over Tucker Bayou extending into the eastern Choctawhatchee Bay, in Northwest Florida. It is one of my favorite areas to canoe and stand-up paddle.
Usually when I post to my personal page in Facebook, I set the post-privacy to friends only, but when I uploaded this image yesterday, I accidentally uploaded on the public setting, and it spread like wildfire. Ordinarily I have a few “likes” and maybe one or two instances where people have shared my image onto their own page. This photo had been shared 119 times in one day.
This view is iconic for the area. certainly, but there was a quality to the light, a certain late-summer gold on the grass, that I could see between the trees all the way from my house a good ways up the bayou. The attraction was such that I took only a few seconds to brush my teeth before rushing out the door to capture it, afraid it would change before I could travel the long mile to get there. I took a couple of shots with my good camera, and then I shot this one with my iPhone 4S for immediate upload. Some of my friends on social media have told me they enjoy my morning shots, and it is gratifying to hear their comments. Sharing an experience or a perception through an image makes it more meaningful to me. But the number of “shares” on social media has surprised me, and I am pleased that so many people appreciated this simple scene. Thankfully, I had remembered to watermark it with my website, which if the image is not altered on purpose, allows me to retain a connection as it travels the web.
My website is being updated. When I saw my image starting to go viral, I called my webmaster to ask him to put Facebook “share” buttons on my site so the path would be circular, from the Facebook image on my personal page, to my website, and then back to my Facebook art page. He responded immediately — kudos to Brian at www.andersonsolutions.com