Learning through photosharing

Under the influence
Winter is probably not the best of times to be a tourist in Bucharest. Apart from the cold, there's a general lack of easily available information. Even with a Rough Guide, we found it quite difficult to navigate, ending up instead just wandering around looking at and sometimes photographing interesting looking buildings. This place looked quite attractive, I clicked and moved on. Later on, after uploading my photographs, I returned to my Flickr stream and noticed a comment. The photograph had received a new tag - stavrolpeos - and I'd been invited to send it to a group, which of course, I did without hesitation. The group is a 371 strong archive of images of the exterior and interior of the Stravropoleos Church, showing it over time and through the seasons. From my desktop I wandered around this visual record of the church, looking at the various contributions. There were tourist snaps, some showing those who visited the church, their girlfriends, boyfriends and so on; others were more studied, photoshoped or carefully composed. I learnt about this place, the atmosphere, the decor, the restoration, and also something about how people feel about Stavropoleos Church. Little of this was rendered in writing, apart from the short paragraph written by the administrator of the group who explains his or her interest and connection with the church. Google will offer you this - again simply visual. You have to go to Wikipedia to add to your factual knowledge. I was quite moved by the Flickr experience and felt the real benefit of being connected with others in this world of photosharing. I suppose I was learning from the widom of crowds.