Fancy a challenge?
The Found-Film site is now coming up to a year old, and I’ve got into a routine of adding new photos most days to make sure there is always fresh content on the site.
As the months have passed, I’ve noticed that both my approach to the pictures I post and my thoughts as to the purpose of the site have changed. Initially, when I first thought about starting the site it was as a way of showing pictures I’d found on film discovered in my vintage cameras. Then, as the content built, it has mainly consisted of colour slides I’ve started collecting, and now I’m really trying to post interesting photos that I discover in the different sets of slides I’ve acquired.
So at the start I was simply posting photos as I picked them out of the box or collection. Recently, however, and following on from my attempts to get the site more interesting from an SEO point of view, I’ve been much more selective in the photos I’ve posted and also I’ve been trying to get more information regarding locations, descriptions and dates than the initial photos.
After taking this approach for a few weeks I realised that there is actually quite a lot of fun to be had trying to identify locations and objects, but that it isn’t possible for me to be able to identify all the pictures I have. So I thought to myself, ‘why not see if anyone else would like to have a try’, and I hit upon the idea of letting others see if they would like to contribute their detective skills to the problem.
What I’ve done is introduced a new section called Challenges to the site.
A challenge is a photo which has been scanned with a higher resolution than the other photos, and with a magnifying glass option to allow people to examine the picture in detail for clues as to the location or identification of objects. In many cases I don’t know anything about the photo, so any information people provide is helping to build the site into the source of social history I would like it to become.
If you feel like having a try why not head over to the challenges section of found-film and see if you recognise any of the locations? If you do, just let me know in a comment using the comment form on the same page as the challenge. Once the location or identification has been made I convert the challenge into a normal photo on the site, and add a note giving credit to the helpful person who managed to provide the identification.
