My newest game - because we all know that life is a game... - has been the Wikipedia Loves Art scavenger hunt. This delightful idea combined several things that I love, and I took to it like a fish to water. First of all the concept: Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia) joined with Flickr (a website where folks can store and display their photos) to offer museums the chance to get amateur photographers into their museums to photograph the collections.
Now you might think that museums would never allow people to take photographs -- but that was the old days. Now, museums are clambering to build online photo albums of their entire collections and it's expensive to hire professional photographers and it's painstaking business making all the numbers match up, etc. So, why not put some rules in place (no flash, no tripods), offer some cheesy prizes, and anything that is usable is to the better at little cost. And for some museums it might actually promote some new visitors or local interest.
Alors, I looked at the list of museums, armed with my new camera, and said - "What! no French museums. Sacre-bleu!" However, there were a couple of interest to me, one being the Victoria and Albert in London (merely a train ride away -hee hee hee) and Lo and Behold, the Taft Museum in Cincinnati Oh. As the contest ran the entire month of February, and I had planned to go back to the US then anyway (searching some sunshine), I thought "why not?"
Well, I did a little homework (read all the rules, read up on all the categories - using Wikipedia of course) and made plans to play "Wiki Loves Art."
So, I found a relatively cheap ticket to London on the Eurostar, and planned a day at the V&A. That's right, a day. Well actually, just a few hours. 2:45 hours on the train, a ride to South Kensington on the Tube and then a walk through the underground tunnel to the museum. I never actually went outside the entire time I was in that country! I was back in Paris by 8:30 with nearly 300 photos -- and you can believe I was hooked.
I spent the next three days sorting, "tagging" and labeling my photos and then submitted them to Flickr. In the meantime, I
had spread the word to 3 other friends who were also photo buffs. Lisa and Tamara actually went to all of the New York museums on the list, and Carole was going to play, but ultimately didn't get any photos in.In the meantime, though, I was thinking, well, I am going to be in the US for nearly 3 weeks, and Grandma cancelled our trip to California...what other museums are on that list??
Did you know for just $18 round-trip you can take the Megabus to Indianapolis? Did you know you can get wifi on the megabus, so you can upload your photos right to flickr even before you get back to Cincinnati? Good thing, too because those photos had to be in by Feb. 28th at midnight. But the most important thing to know is -- Indianapolis Museum of Art is really amazing. You must go there. And, they have a really nice website and online catalog - which will have more photos once this contest is finished.
Needless to say, I went WAY OVER BOAR
D here. But I must tell you I loved every minute of it. I will post a few of my favorite photos. I took nearly 1000, and submitted about 500. If you want to see more, let me know and I will send you to the Flickr pages for each collection. I must point out though, 12000+ photos were submitted for nearly 20 museums, and there are a lot of really amazing photos, and some not so good. Mine fall somewhere in the middle. I am sure that several of my Indy photos will go to good use, and hopefully some from the other two will as well. But for me, I really had a blast and would do it again in a heartbeat.
