01-02-08 – What a Load of Crop

Wow did the voting on my entries not go like I expected. I am definitely not complaining, but I would have expected the “Ladies day?” one to get more votes than it did. My “Fountain” entry is doing much better than I expected, which is always a good thing.

Looking for patterns in results after the fact is always interesting… In this case all the entries with text, with the exception of Marley’s “Sunoco” photo, got 4 votes or less. It looks like people weren’t responding to things you had to read this time. I wouldn’t have predicted that, but the numbers speak for themselves. 🙂

I think that’s actually quite easily explained… while the text can make a clever crop, plain text is not visually appealing. I think people were voting for either “clever change in crop to un-cropped picture” or “pretty cropped picture”.

Looking for patterns in results after the fact is always interesting… In this case all the entries with text, with the exception of Marley’s “Sunoco” photo, got 4 votes or less. It looks like people weren’t responding to things you had to read this time. I wouldn’t have predicted that, but the numbers speak for themselves. 🙂

In terms of looking for the quick reaction or punchline, text often wins- but in terms of actually looking at the image, text seems to lose. There was an exhibit here recently of some very well done photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans. We were discussing that the ones with words on signs, people spent less time looking at than they spent on the photos without text, even though the non-text parts were just as detailed and poignant. The text seemed to rob people’s attention from the rest of the photo.

So I guess it makes sense for this particular contest, that the text didn’t have as much effect.

Thanks anneb! I took quite a few pics of those koi thinking the whole time that I’d end up in the pond among them. I still don’t know how I managed to stay ashore. (I’m not terribly well-balanced. Ahem.)

I also fell for U-man’s cropped shot when I first looked at it. And laughed when I looked at the original. I thought it captured the spirit of these week’s theme very nicely.

This one was fun!

I probably should have saved my pics for a later contest…. ack! bringing up the rear of the thread. Oh well.

We need some cute kid themed contests, I’ll do good at those forsure!

Quick question about FSM… The data for this contest has been out of synch with the Fark thread all day. How often does it update? For instance, U-Man’s winning humpback has 37 votes on FSM but 39 on the Fark results page. It’s been like that since early this afteroon. I’m sure it will catch up, but I was just curious about the timing.