Popular Cameras (part II)
Having pondered this for a bit, of course what you'd really want to know is not which cameras are the most popular (by counting uploaded photos), but which cameras take the better pictures (by counting some 'better picture' metric).
What metric? flickr has a concept of interestingness which I've always been a bit suspicious of. Interestingness is a secret combination of various factors, but since I have a picture with 0 comments, 0 favourite tags and 0 views listed as one of my more interesting photos, the algorithm is either extremely insightful, or not as clever as we'd like. Ideally I'd like to take some combination of the number of favourites plus number of views divided by some factor that combines the number of tags and groups to which the picture belongs [1]. But, and it's a big but, getting the data I want for a better-than-interestingness metric isn't currently possible, so instead here's a look at the number of photo's by different camera models in the top 500 interesting pictures with a taken date over the past twelve months.
[Click for larger image]
Caveats:
- the unknowns are the largest category by far. They're pictures for which the flickr API didn't return an EXIF tag with model information.
- the data also doesn't include images for which the flickr user elected not to be included in external queries. So here's the top
- I've combined Digital Rebel and Digital Rebel XT numbers with 300 and 350 respectively since I assume that's what the flickr stats have done
So here's another view, this time of the top 10 cameras by interesting photos in the top 500 excluding unknowns:
[Click for larger image]
The top five cameras by number of pictures uploaded (based on data from the flickr cameras page):
- Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT / 350D
- Nikon D50
- Canon EOS 20D
- Nikon D70
- Canon EOS Digital Rebel / 300D
and here's the top five by number of pictures in the top 500 interesting pictures:
- Canon EOS 350D / Digital Rebel XT
- Canon EOS 20D
- Nikon D50
- Nikon D70s
- Canon EOS 5D
Conclusions? The number of unknowns is enough to swamp any meaningful comparison, but since there's nothing but SLRs in the top of the list, it's safe to assume that if you want 'interesting' pictures, a dSLR is the way to go (or that people that have dSLRs known how to play the 'interesting' game with their uploads to flickr ;-)
[1] The rationale here is that adding tags or adding to groups increases the visibility of the picture to the flickr community and so would result in an increase in views and favourites irrespective of how good the picture is.
tags: interesting | interestingness | flickr | cameras | popular | photography
posted by aiddy @ 8:33 AM, permalink
3 comments
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3 Comments:
I'd like to see a geographical break-down of these figures.
I have a feeling that interestingness is probably related to it's geograpical location. The least popular locations for taking a photograph - being rated as the most interesting?
i.e. a crap photograph from an incapable photographer in the Sahara desert might be considered more interesting than a work of genius by an expat's pic of the space needle in seattle (say)?
Not being one to leave a question unanswered (or at least attempted), I've done a little more digging.
Looking at the top 500 'interesting' pictures over the past two years, a grand total of 90 have been geotagged (encoded with information about a location expressed in latitude and longitude). Of those, two pictures are geotagged with a location within a boundary approximately corresponding to downtown Seattle and the Seattle Center (location of said space needle); while an amazing zero pictures have the location within a bounding box corresponding approximately to the the area covered by the greater Sahara region.
Now it may be that all the really great pictures of the Sahara haven't been geotagged, or have been geotagged with the location of the photographer's first primary school in Dorset.
Hope that helps.
Thanks, I shall sleep soundly tonight.
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