Stumble Upon

Oh me oh my have I got a website to share. Although this is a trend among trends to millions of people out there, I was recently introduced to StumbleUpon.com and I have to have to say I'm positively addicted. It was actually my Mom who told me about the website and I was skeptical at first; in my head I was protesting "There's no way checking a few boxes pertaining to Photography, Drugs, and K-12 Education will result in interesting websites that appeal to me." Well ladies and gentlemen I couldn't have been more wrong. One of the first websites I came across was a photography website titled vi.sualize.us (that is the web address also) and I spent an honest to goodness hour and a half clicking through photo after photo, drowning myself in the unique stories told by these pictures. When a person uploads a picture they put word tags with it so it comes up when people search for that specific tag, so whatever you put in the search box will come out, in one light or the other. Instead of searching I sort of just browsed. When you click on a picture, the right margin is filled with that artists favorite pictures and other pictures in relation to the one you're looking at. Click after click I became more enticed with what I was coming across. From what I was choosing to look at and filing through the stream of 'favorites' and related pictures, I got on a somewhat vogue/love/human-expressionism/straight-up-pretty-picture track and ended up saving a BUNCH (is that allowed?) of them for a future slideshow. I'm excited. So let me see what I can come up with right now...

Taking the search option, I typed in 'hope' (and suffice it to say next to everything else that came up with 'hope' in the tag so did pictures of Obama. Go America :]) and the first picture I clicked on was this one :




which is alright, nothing TOO special, but then I was led to this one (choosing from the pictures on the right side):





I'd have to say that's a cool way to displaying a quote. I got asked to Homecoming that way once, but hey, whatever works, right :) Okay so here's where it gets exciting, from the right hand side I picked this one next:





First of all, that boy is damn cute and second, what an amazing picture :) I love the incorporation of the small things flying around him. And the look on his face is priceless. Alright moving right along, what shall I pick next? Hmm.. How about this one:





Cool huh? I'm thinking he's throwing some kind of smoke grenade or tear gas or something. Intense. What else can we get our hands on? Ohh try this one on for size:





I'd have to say I couldn't sit still or give up the man hours to complete something so detailed. But thank goodness not everyone is like me and people DO make these things for people like me to revel at :)


So as you can see, it's a pretty interesting time milling through pictures on the visualize website. I'll have to post the slideshow I make with the one's I've saved, that'll be fun. So I guess this post wasn't more than to rave about StumbleUpon and for me to get all pumped up about photography. And as a disclaimer, I know those pictures don't look THAT AMAZING, but if you give it a few minutes and you poke around on that website, I will see your foot go BAM!, into your mouth. I guess I just showed those ones to example the picture-to-picture clicking and how if you kept it going, you could spend the better part of an evening without stopping, blinking, or getting bored.

Gosh, someone should hire me to boast about their product because I'm thinking I'm starting to get good at it!