Lifted from comments: A flickr trend that worries me

[elfs]

Someone wrote about my most recent photo of Yamaraashi-chan:

I hadn't realized how grown-up Yamaraashi-chan was getting till that photo. It's a great picture of her as a young woman, where previously I've seen great pictures of her as a child.

I'm not picking on the writer, really; I happen to agree with the sentiment, even while I'm cautious endorsing it. Yamaraashi-chan is still just a kid who spends her days vacillating between playing with dolls and watching The Most Extreme Animals, and tweening out, lying in her bed looking up at the ceiling, brooding. "I'm not brooding!" she insists. "I'm thinking."

But while the layout is still set as it is, go take a look at my flickr account. You might notice a pattern. I've noticed it before myself, but this time it's particularly icky. Many of the photos there aren't on my blog. I took 450 photographs this trip, selected them down to maybe ten per day, then picked four or five to send to flickr, and finally choose two or three for each blog entry.

Some of the flickr'd pictures have gotten nine, ten, maybe 16 views. Yamaraashi-chan's picture had, as of this morning, been downloaded 65 times. And the paranoid part of me wants to know if between my fatherly pride and wise caution, pride isn't making exercising caution impossible.

I'm tempted to stop talking about the girls entirely, because this trend just icks me. I don't want to think about why that picture is five times more popular than the average photo on my flickr account. But I probably have to.

Comments

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming you're updating because I can't see much at this point...

I would tend towards caution. Both your girls are very beautiful and Yamaraashi-chan sometimes has a vulnerability that is attractive to predators.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to put you in a panic, but as you pointed out, you need to be aware as a parent. I, and I'm sure your other readers, love hearing about your girls and seeing the photos as they grow, but their safety is more important. You do what you need to do.

I look at my cousins as they grow and I know they need to sometimes learn things the hard way, but you want to protect them too. It's a hard balancing act between letting them be free to grow and holding them safe and tight.