SeaCompression is the huge Burning Man decompression party thrown by the Seattle region every year. As we often do, Carol and I set up a photo booth and snapped many of the happy people during the course of the evening.

I was originally just going to post these to the Burning Man Seattle site, but decided to duplicate them here to add more content for the random photo viewer at the top of the page. Want to see them? Here they are!

No flickr Spew here, nosiree…

We all love looking at pictures on the web, don’t we? So much so that photo-sharing sites have exploded in recent years, giving everyone the ability to quickly and easily share their snaps with friends, family and complete strangers around the world.

Isn’t that just great?

Well, not entirely.

Yes, sharing things is wonderful. Having simple-to-use tools is absolutely fantabulous. Immediacy is devine. But dammit, I’m starting to get a bit tired of what I call the flickr Spew. I suspect you can tell what I’m talking about just from the term itself, but in case it’s escaping you, a flickr Spew is what I call the practice of blindly uploaded the entire contents of your memory card to a photo-sharing site without the slightest bit of sorting, editing or culling. Sure, it’s by far the easiest thing to do and one can even argue that it gives the audience the most content, but let’s get real. What it gives is a lot of junk obscuring the genuinely good images. It’s taking the bulk of the work off of the photographer and putting it on every single viewer who then has to sift through countless dark, blurry frames that should never have been uploaded.

But it’s not just the presence of all these bad shots that bothers me, it’s that people seem to be OK with it. They’re willing to wade through the muck if it means they can see pictures of some event all the sooner.

I consider myself to be a totally amatuer hack photographer, and the only reason I’m able to post collections of semi-OK pictures is because I take a lot of snaps, toss out the 2/3 that suck and spend some time correcting, sizing and cropping the remaining 1/3. This is not a quick process.

This past weekend was SeaCompression, the annual Seattle-area Burning Man decompression party. As we often do, Carol and I operated a portrait studio and took pictures of the festively costumed revelers. Since we had rather controlled conditions, pretty much all of the 350 images will be keepers, but it will take me at least two weeks to work my way through them all. But less than 36 hours after the event ended, I got the first “Where are the pictures??” email, and well, I can only blame that on the curse of the flickr Spew.