Images of the Bloedel Reserve An Analysis of Internet Photo & Video Collections
K. W. Bridges 2019 1
2019 © K. W. Bridges www.kimbridges.com
Bloedel Photographs A picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures, for me, are a way to get informed. I use other people’s images to learn about a place. In a reciprocal way, I post photos to help other people learn about places that I’ve visited. I’ve visited the Bloedel Reserve several times and I have a substantial collection of images. The issue involves set of images. We’re not concerned with that single snapshot (selfie?) that shows you’ve been to a place. This is about serious collections of images that have, at their focus, the Bloedel Reserve. We’re not concerned here about memorializing a person’s visit to this wonder botancial garden. I have two questions that provoked the analyses presented here. • What are the best image collections that help a person learn about the Bloedel Reserve? • Which is the best collection for my photos? I want to find a sets of photos that fully characterizie the Reserve. I’m looking for photos that are interesting. Images that tell the Bloedel’s story. I’m after inspiration. And I’m looking for gaps. Specifically, where can my photos fill in missing areas? There are several focal questions. Where will my photos best complement existing collections? Here, I’m likely to consider how the quality of my photos matches those already in a collection. Also, do my images add to the collection in meaningful ways? Which collections best handle organization and metadata information? I want my images to be useful. Rich information about the photos helps. Having the photos organized helps me tell my story about the Bloedel Reserve. Will my photos fit into a site existing organization?
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Bloedel Reserve Features Part of the evaluation system used here centers on whether a set of photos covers all of the features of the Bloedel Reserve. The following list features began with the named places from the 2019 map. A few of the map’s numbered locations are not included as these are more for orientation and not tied to a specific reserve feature. A few features have been added. The Bloedel Reserve website highlights ten features. These are marked in bold in the list. Note that here, the Meadow and Sheep Sheds are separated. Similarly, the Buxton Bird Marsh and Buxton Meadow are separated in this list. On the Reserve’s website these feature pairs are each considered a single feature. The Jajpanese Garden & Stroll Paths may, or may not, include the Sand & Stone Garden (the website is a bit ambiguous). 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
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Feature Gatehouse & Gift Shop Meadow Sheep Sheds Forest (or Woodlands) Buxton Bird Marsh Buxton Meadow Trestle Bridge Boardwalk Forest Exit Mid Pond Bloedel Residence Bluff Overlook Stair Bypass Waterfall Overlook Birch Garden (or Trail)
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Feature Bluff Trail Christmas Pond The Glen Horseshoe Trail Swan Pond Orchid Trail Maple Lane Japanese Garden East Entrance Sand & Stone Garden Japanese Guest House Japanese Garden & Stroll Paths Japanese Garden West Entrance Moss Garden Reflection Pool Camelia Walk
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The Rubric: A tool for evaluation The following rubric sets out evaluative facets and criteria for judging relative success. The categories were chosen to represent what I consider important to botanical gardens, in general. Categories Feature coverage, including Scale: Each site has a set of features that it recognizes as the basic elements of its design. These features can be (should be!) viewed at different scales (e.g., forest vs trees). Image quality: Digital image quality has improved with camera technology and post-processing software developments. Images can (should!) be sufficiently large for modern displays. Composition is an important component of image quality. Quantity: The cost of taking, processing and storing digital photos as made it practical to capture many images and present them to the public in cost-efficient ways. There is no reason to skimp. Metadata: Very basic metadata (e.g., photo date, camera, lens, exposure) is automatically stored with most images. It is important to add the location (precision is helpful) and a meaningful description of the photo. The photo-delivery service should expose this information. “Story” qualities: There is often a deep purpose for a site that has guided its development. This is reflected in the overall architecture, as well as the details. This may be a subtle quality, such as “spiritual,” or it may have strong cultural roots. The site is there for a reason. Images should reveal this reason. Special interest: Special features, attributes or oddities should not be neglected. Historical events, commemorations, unique items, and other things that should be known about the site need coverage. Findability and Organization: The photo collection needs to be found, and once you get to the collection, it should be organized in a way (or ways) that make sense and which are useful. Temporal changes: Temporal scales range from seasonal to multi-year. A collection that captures these temporal changes shows important dynamic aspects of the site. 4
Category Score
Inadequate 1
Marginal 2
Feature coverage, including Scale
Only a fraction of the specific features covered. Close-up or narrowly focused shots dominate.
Emphasis is on a few high-visibility features with a smattering of other features included. Some different scales used
Image quality
Many poor photos with obvious flaws that detract from the viewing experience.
Quantity
Outstanding 4
Exceptional 5
Most of the features included in the set but the distribution is weighted toward a few features. Scale is used to advantage.
A good balance in the types of images with most of the features given some attention.
All, or almost all features covered in ways that highlight the character of each feature. Photo scale is particularly well handled.
Average appearing snaps for the most part. Few, if any, outstanding photos.
Many good photos with a mix of average images.
Most are excellent images with only a few which detract from the overall quality.
All images are high quality and show careful composition and post-processing.
Only a few photos.
A small collection with little redundancy.
An adequate collection with most photos relevant.
A substantial number of photos that cover a range of techniques and viewpoints.
A large, wellculled collection with care regarding redundancy.
Metadata
No metadata.
Metadata often missing or minimal.
Essential metada- Essential data ta, such as date and, often, addiand description. tional info about the photo.
Each image is well documented with extensive and informative information.
“Story� qualities
No story in the set; just a pile of photos.
A few photos get at the basic purpose of the site.
Many of the photos hint at the site’s basic purpose and design but they are mixed with many that are not relevant.
Most of the images tell the general story behind the site, often with compelling visual impact.
The images join together in a powerful way to reveal the basic architecture and fundamental design of the site.
Special interest
No images of things that are particularly special.
A few special images but mostly untied to any theme.
A few special themes are supported by sets of images.
Themes are used to highlight special things and multiple images offer strong support.
Themes that are both expected and those which are novel are presented as integrated visual narratives.
Findability & Organization
Set of images is hard to locate and, once found, is not organized in a meaningful way.
Images are easy to find but not organized in helpful ways.
Easily found and some helpful organization.
Obvious route to the photos and organization is clear and useful.
Very logical organization that encourages in-depth exploration.
All seasons are represented but emphasis is uneven.
All seasons are shown in a balanced way and their special features are highlighted.
Temporal changes Only one season shown or it is ambiguous.
Adequate 3
Some features Most of the seafrom several sea- sons are shown, sons are included. but they are not treated equally.
The application of this rubric to the sixteen photo sites is shown on page 24.
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Internet Photo & Video Collections There are a lot of places that you can find photos and videos of the Bloedel Reserve. That’s a great feature of the Internet. If you want to see what the Bloedel Reserve looks like, you’re likely to find a website that has what you need. Photo and video sites are created for different purposes. Some are commercial and they sell stock photos. GettyImages and Alamy are such sites. Other sites are a byproduct of web scraping; photos associated with the words “Bloedel Reserve” are retrieved with a search request. Consider a Google search and looking at the Images tab. Some sites store sets of photos. These are organized in several ways. Each contributor has a collection; this is often broken into different categories. The same photos may also contribute to to one or more curated, site-wide collections. Flickr is an example. Social media sites, like Facebook and Instagram, have photos attached to member postings. Organizations have websites and these, too, generally have sets of photos. Video sites are sometimes a bit different, but many photo sites also host videos. The photo and video sites differ in usefulness for someone wanting to visualize the Bloedel Reserve. These differences are shown in the following table where the eight rubric categories. A rapid assessment of each photo site was done to obtain a score for each category. Numbers and site information is current on September 6, 2019.
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Photo and Video Collection Survey There are a lot of differences between photo and video sites. Low scores in the rubric show that a particular site is not fulfilling its potential to show the Bloedel Reserve in the best possible way. That can be fixed! Each of the sites allows the addition of photos or videos. In a few cases, such as 500px, you probably should have an annual subscription. The sixteen sites chosen for evaluation are not an exhaustive set of photo repositories. For example, Twitter is not included in this set. Sorry, Twitter fans. There is a limit on the time I have available for these analyses.
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Bloedel Reserve Website URL: www.bloedelreserve.org Go to the Experience page for access to the photo collection. Number of Photos: 56 (linked from the page showing 10 Reserve features) Comments: An excellent set of photos.
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Wikipedia Website URL: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloedel_Reserve Number of Photos: 5 Comments: This is a small Wikipedia entry. While it has basic facts, it isn’t very interesting. There hasn’t been much updated in this entry for quite a while.
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Wikimedia Commons URL: commons.wikimedia.org Number of Photos: 35 Comments: A nice, small set of photos. Most were taken by one person in October, 2009. This site has some interesting potential as one of its purposes is to provide images with few restrictions on their reuse.
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Flickr URL: flickr.com Number of Photos: 4,578 Comments: This website has the reputation for hosting high-quality photos. Clicking on a photo gets you a big image along with a lot of information about the photo. There are usually a lot of comments, too.
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500px Website URL: 500px.com Go to the main page and click on a tab, like “popular.” This brings up a page that has a search window. You can then find Bloedel Reserve photos. Number of Photos: 139 Comments: This website, by its own description, is a place for photographers to store only their best photos. You’d expect the quality to be high, and it is. There is abundant metadata, including the photo date, uploading date and camera information. Not all images have metadata, but those that do are quite informative. The seasonal range of photos is good, although there is an obvious bias toward Fall. Winter is well represented. The diversity of features is good. Moreover, the balance is excellent. Some of the photos in this set are very unique.
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Google Maps URL: maps.google.com Search for Bloedel Reserve, then click on the Bloedel Reserve name. A list of photos, and other information will appear on the left panel. Number of Photos: Many, many (the total number of images is not obvious) Comments: There are a LOT of pictures. The tabs (all, latest, 360, video, inside) give a bit of categorization. Note that there are only 13 video and one “inside� photo. Clicking on a photo in the left panel brings up a large image in the map window. You get the photo date, along with the photographer.
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Google Search (images) URL: just type in the URL/search window Number of Photos: A huge number of Bloedel Reserve photos is retrieved as this is a web-wide search engine. Hover over a photo and you get the pixel dimensions. Click on a photo and it is shown in a separate window. Click on the image in that new window and you’ll open the website that has the photo. Comments: There are a few tabs that left you see photos from similar places (moss garden, reflecting pool). This is useful for only a few Bloedel Reserve features. If you use Tools, there is a menu that lets you select the type of use, such as “Labeled for noncommercial reuse.”
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YouTube URL: youtube.com Search in the window for Bloedel Reserve. Number of Videos: More than 50 Comments: Storage on YouTube is free. That makes it a magnet for individuals to store their video clips.
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Vimeo URL: vimeo.com Number of Videos: 27 Use the search windows to get Bloedel Reserve videos. Hover over a video and you’ll get the video length and counter for “likes” and the number of comments. You also see approximately how long ago the video was uploaded. Click on the thumbnail image and you get a page with more information about the video, comments and a count of the number of views. Comments: This is a paid storage location with several tiers.
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Facebook URL: facebook.com Number of Photos: Many, many (the total number is not easily determined) Comments: Search for “bloedel reserve” and then select Photos. Click on See All. Click on a photo and you’ll get the original entry. Clicking on photos at that point scrolls you through facebook entries for Bloedel Reserve. This is obviously a popular place to post photos, along with a few descriptive words. People often comment on an entry.
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Instagram URL: instagram.com This URL gets you to a starting page, but you need an account to get farther. There is a work-around. Just search for “instagram bloedel reserve” and you’ll get a link to an Instagram page. There will be a search window on that page. Number of Photos: 8,362 posts (I’m assuming that each is a photo) Searching with “bloedelreserve” get the photos that the Reserve has posted (684). Comments: There is a width limit of 1080 pixels. Portrait images can be up to 1350 pixels tall. But the standard seems to be square (1080 x 1080). This site uses a hashtag “#bloedelreserve” to link to the Reserve (in general). More specific hash tags (e.g., #frankbuxtonbirdmarsh) can be added to do some categorization. Other example hashtags are #mossgarden and #bloedellife. Clicking on a photo gives you the comments, number of likes and the photo date.
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Yelp URL: yelp.com Do a search for Bloedel Reserve near Seattle (two fields to fill). Number of Photos: 294 Comments: You get a date and maybe a very short image title. You can scroll through full-size images or view 30 thumbnails at a time. The photos are attached to the reviews, so you can scroll through the reviews and see the images in a more detailed context.
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TripAdvisor URL: tripadvisor.com Scroll down and you’ll see a picture taken at Bloedel Reserve. Look at the bottom of the picture and you’ll see “All photos” and the number of photos for this location. Click on “All photos” (it is a link) and you’ll get the page with the photo thumbnails. Number of Photos: 493 Comments: You can scroll through a gallery of photos, but there isn’t any information for the images. If you read through the reviews, you’ll see that some reviews have photos. This gives you a bit of information about the images (such as the date). There may be something revealing in the text of the written review, too.
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Alamy URL: alamy.com Use the search windows to get Bloedel Reserve images. Number of Photos: 120 Comments: These are stock images, so you need to pay for them if you want to use them in a project. You get good basic metadata, except there is no camera information. These are, in general, large and high quality images. That’s what you’d expect from a commercial site.
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GettyImages URL: gettyimages.com Number of Photos: < 25 Comments: This is a small set, some of which were not taken at the Reserve. The metadata is generally sparse. Mostly the date and a short comment describing the feature. The quality is quite poor for many of the photos. For example, the residence has severe distortion (which is easily corrected in post-processing). The variety of features is very weak. Many images are near redundancies. Sixteen of the images are listed as royalty-free. Note that iStockphoto.com (part of GettyImages) has a largely overlapping collection. Also, quite a few images in this collection had Georgia as the location.
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ShutterStock URL: www.shutterstock.com Number of Photos: 2 Comments: It is hardly worth commenting on this site. This is extremely limited. Several photos retrieved with the search are not from the Reserve.
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Rubric Evaluation
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Photo Site Bloedel Website Wikipedia
Features
Quality
Quantity
4
5
1
Wikimedia
Rubric Category Metadata
Story
Special
Organization Temporal
3
2
4
4
4
2
2
1
2
2
2
2
1
3
2
3
2
3
2
2
2
Flickr
5
5
5
5
3
3
2
4
500px
5
5
5
5
3
3
3
4
Google Maps
5
3
4
2
1
2
2
4
Google Search YouTube
5
2
4
4
4
4
2
4
2
2
2
2
3
3
2
2
Vimeo
4
3
2
2
3
3
2
2
4
2
4
2
3
3
2
3
4
3
4
2
2
3
2
4
Yelp
4
2
4
2
2
2
2
2
TripAdvisor
4
2
4
3
3
2
2
2
Alamy
5
4
3
5
2
3
2
3
GettyImages
2
3
1
2
1
2
2
2
ShutterStock
1
2
1
2
1
1
2
1
A Few Observations The rubric categories features, quantity and quality had the average highest scores. The hardest rubric categories were story and findability/organization. These two dimensions show where photo collections can be enhanced. Adding good organization and telling interesting stories is difficult to achieve in many of the photo sites. Overall, 500px, Flickr, and Google Search were the top scoring photo sites. The Bloedel Website followed closely behind. GettyImages, Wikipedia and ShutterStock were at the bottom of the photo sites. A lot can be done to tell the story of the Bloedel Reserve in ways that will interest and engage the public. Instagram and Facebook are not the only useful outlets.
Photo Notes Front Cover: On the trail before the Frank Buxton Pond in an area near the Lowland Conifer Forest. Light comes through the tree canopy and illuminates the fern covering the forest floor. There seem to be few photos taken in this area. July 21, 2019. Sony A7R3 with Sony EF 24 mm GM lens. 1/500 sec, f/7.1, ISO 3,200. Credit: K. W. Bridges. Page 3: Looking down from the Orchid Trail toward Maple Lane. The Maple Lane area is rarely, if ever, identified in photos of the Bloedel Reserve. The trail leading to this area is fairly obscure. July 21, 2019. Sony A7R3 with Sony EF 24 mm GM lens. 1/500 sec, f/7.1, ISO 500. Credit: K. W. Bridges.
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