as i've occasionally mentioned before, i have been gradually creating an online archive of my travel photos on my flickr account. each trip i've taken is its own photo set and that set contains every photo i took on the trip. i don't leave out the sucky photos, i upload, catalogue and tag everything. i even have a tag called fuckup which i give to all the blurry shots, images with my camera strap in them, etc. the idea of each photo set is to have all of my photos accessible to me (and anyone else who wants to see them) online, even the really shitty ones.
sometimes when i travel i can't take a photo and so one of my fellow travelers takes it for me and then sends it to me later. i've been adding those photos to my flickr set too, even though, i didn't take the photo. i guess the idea is that i meant to take the photo. it's only incidental that i didn't actually push the button myself. besides, all my sets always contain pictures of me and most of them were taken by someone else using my camera. so there is some precedent for allowing photos that i didn't take to get into the set.
so this morning in my email inbox i found a link to a bunch of photos from someone i met in syria. she's polish. her trip was from poland to ukraine to turkey to syria and then back. the photos she sent cover the entire trip.
me and this polish person spent an entire day together in syria, taking local buses and hitchhiking our way from damascus to deir mar musa to ma'alula and then back to damascus again. as i looked at the photos my friend sent me, i immediately recognized the ones she took during our day together. i also could easily tell which photos she took in syria when we weren't traveling together.
here's the thing: at no point during the day did i ever ask this friend to take any photos for me. the entire time we traveled together, i had a camera with me and it worked just fine. sometimes we took photos of the same thing standing side-by-side. however, my friend is clearly a better photographer than me. her photos, even of the same thing, are clearly better than mine.
i am tempted to add some of her photos to my syria photo set on flickr. and not just the ones from our day together. she also took some great photos of damascus when i wasn't traveling with her anymore. but when does my syria photoset cease to be my photoset and just a set of photos i have of a place i visited? more specifically:
(1) should i add my friend's photos that she took when i spent the day with her to my flickr photoset? they are not my photos. but while i may never have asked her to take the shots for me, but they did at least reflect some of my experience there.
(2) should i add my friend's photos that she took in syria when we were not together, but include images of things that i visited on my own? if i do that does it mean that it's okay to google up some more pictures of damascus sites and put them in my set too?
this is basically a slippery slope issue. once i start adding her photos to my set, i'm not sure when i should stop. do i have to limit the photos to syrian photos? mrs. noz and i visited turkey in 1997, can i take some her turkey shots as well? i've never been to ukraine, does that mean i can't take those photos too?
