I regularly post my pictures on Flickr. Most of the time they get a handful of faves and a couple of comments. But sometimes they attract more than the average amount of views and faves. I find it hard to predict what makes a picture popular. Part is due to the exposure it gets when it gets invited into the Explore group (or other invite only groups). Which guarantees a lot of views and therefore also much more faves. Sometimes people seem to like something I cannot explain. Don't get me wrong, I post the pictures I like myself. But the pictures I like most aren't always the same as the ones liked most by the Flickr community.
Here are the top 10 photos on my Flickr stream according to Flickr stats, sorted on number of faves with their original title and the number of views and comments.

Last month we participated in a photo competition of our local veterinarian. The theme was "people/pet relationship". The winning photo may be used on cards/invites to pet owners to remind them of the yearly vaccinations of their dog or cat. The winner of the competition also gets a price.  

My wife came up with the idea of us and the dog sleeping together in bed. I worked out a plan and thought it might be possible to pull of by making use of a tripod and the remote app on my phone. With te app we could see what the camera was seeing and trigger the camera when ready. We coached our dog into our bed (the sheets needed to be cleaned anyway). But she was very suspicious and a bit nervous as she didn't knew why would want her on the bed (that's normally not allowed), and was probably suspicious, because we wanted her laying in a specific position. Our first plan was to all leigh on our backs. But Nikki didn't want to do that.

​Eventually we had her on the right spot. My wife and I then laid beside her and we pulled the sheet over us and the dog, and once I thought it looked kind of okay, I shot three pictures. Very soon our dog wanted to leave, she had enough. We didn't want to force her to stay, so we had to make do with what we had.

The publication in the post below wasn't my first. My wife likes to write short stories about life, with me and our 2 dogs. The stories are sometimes funny, sometimes moving, but always great to read. Several years ago she had the stories published and wanted me to illustrate them, as I like to draw. It was great fun, but also hard work, coming up with ideas, than drawing them out on paper and than scanning and coloring them in photoshop. The last book she published is a best of. It's made available as e-book and paperback on bol.com. Click on the photo for a short preview. 

A couple of weeks ago I was approached on Flickr by the editor of Olympus Magazine UK. She said she was working on a fun feature, showing Olympus users' images where their camera featured with them in the shot. She saw my selfie (which I made for a DigiDirect challenge) and said she would love to use it within the magazine. Of course I approved the use of the photo! They also wanted a couple of lines about why I used an Olympus camera. Today I saw they published it. It's in the March issue on page 17. The picture here is the one you see when you click on it. They even linked to my Flickr page. Great stuff!

A while back I was asked if I was interested in exhibiting my pictures at the Royal HaskoningDHV head office, where I work.  I had the opportunity to hang my pictures in the large entry hall and/or our restaurant, but decided to keep it small because of the costs. I decided to hang them just before the tunnel leading to another office and an underground garage (so lots of people passing through). In the picture above a colleague and I are figuring out how many pictures we would need to fill the wall. At that time I had made only three prints.  We decided 5 (60 x 80 cm) prints would suffice. The beautiful animal paintings will be removed at the end of this week, so the photos can hang in their place.