I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

MORE PICCADILLY CIRCUS PICTURES...

I'm very much satisfied with using Fotopic to host my main online gallery for my photos and drawings. I'm very much considering switching to their Premium service, so I can actually make money if people want to put my pictures on posters, mugs, T-shirts, and the like.

But the one problem I'm having with Fotopic is that virtually nothing I put in the gallery apart from thumbnails on the main page is showing up on Google Image Search, a major disadvantage for promoting myself as an artist and photographer. Google Image Search is a great method of passive advertising, enabling me to promote myself for free without actually doing much of anything except for having posted a picture somewhere on the Internet at some point in the past.

Google Image Search did a major re-index at the end of September, archiving images¹ postted on the Internet up through about September 10^th, when I posted my drawing of Covent Garden in London.

Since the reindex, one of the most popular "new" features on this page, in terms of Google hits, seems to be the entry from last May where I a selection of black-and-white photographs I took in downtown Montreal, at Concordia University, and at Dorval Airport in 2003. While I put the complete album at Fotopic, the images that I hotlinked directly to behind text were hosted at Ourmedia.org, "The Global Home for Grassroots Media", and, since I'm such a whore for search engine hits, I'll replicate what I did then, this time with a few other images of Piccadilly Circus in the late 1990s which I've never before posted on the Internet (not counting the one I just posted above). I'm repeating some words here for Google Image Search spider purposes.

A picture of Piccadilly Circus in Westminster, London, in either 1997 or 1998 (before the next two were taken). You can see the Eros statue and fountain, and there are a lot of people posing, and a cheeky little boy squatting. This is the only photo of Piccadilly Circus I have with a red strip saying "Enjoy More" between Coca-Cola and McDonald's.

The typical tourist shot of Piccadilly Circus in Westminster, London, taken on Canada Day (July 1^st) in 1998, with the giant advertising signs on the corner of Glasshouse Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. Call me old-fashioned, but I actually prefer the way Piccadilly Circus looked then, with the static advertising signs, for Foster's, TDK, Sanyo, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Samsung, and Carlsberg, compared to the flat-panel video screen signage they have today. Also, I think this was shortly before Burger King changed its logo. I thought the Gap store opened in 1999, but it seems it was there at least a year or two earlier.

And, finally,

A self-pic of me, Steve Brandon, at Piccadilly Circus in Westminster, London, on July 1^st, 1998. My glasses are crooked because that's real glass in the frames, and that made them damn heavy, to the point where the "arms" cut behind my ears constantly, so I usually didn't put them all of the way on. I forgot there was a Body Shop across the street from the Gap.

They're all interesting pictures, even the last one in kind of a "train-wreck" kind of way, but they don't compare to my photo of Piccadilly Circus in July 2000, upon which I based my Piccadilly Circus drawing, but they're interesting alternate angles on a familiar scene.




¹ This re-index added many photos, but, and I rarely see this mentioned as a problem with Google Image Search, Google Image Search also also has a tendency to "forget" some pictures that were in its index previously, like Homestar Runner's Bubs as the Thnikkaman, this picture of the lovely Keiko Kitagawa, this drawing of a Volkswagen Beetle I did as a 10-year old boy, the original time I posted the postcard for YTV's The Zone with P.J. Phil Guerrero and Snit, a picture of the offbeat anime, Windy Tales, Dancing Mink from Dragon Half, the BBC Star Trek with the cast of The Office, the anime-meets-Kim Possible-esque cover of Marvel's revivied Power Pack, this animated gif I made of Ran Kotobuki from Super Gals! falling from the sky, Atsuko Natsumi from All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, "Marlboro-tan", my Pepsi can radio, me visiting the Cutty Sark ship in London as a 9 year old boy, this picture of Kyosuke, Madoka, and Hikaru from Kimagure Orange Road, J.J. from the Sega Master System game Zillion, a picture of the late Christopher Reeve as Superman standing in front of an American flag backdrop, and many others.

Hmm, I ought to do that again sometime. That was fun. :)

Google Image Search is also very hit-and-miss. They missed a lot of recent photos, like this picture of Jonathan Brandstetter as "Johnny Turbo" from the old Turbografx/Turbo Duo ads, Ami Mizuno a.k.a. Sailor Mercury in a bathtub reading the book Warriors of Legend, all my Canada Day photos including this one with "zombies" at the gates of Parliament, and me, Steve Brandon, eating a McDonald's French Fry, the Nathan Fillion/Malcolm Reynolds cover for the Serenity comic book, following up after Firefly, the Cheat spinning a Laserdisc for Strong Bad, KFC's Colonel Sanders attacking Tatsukichi Kuroi a.k.a. Machida Black from Mihona Fujii's Gals! manga, another anime-style Scooby Doo picture, me, Steve Brandon, holding a can of Heinz Sailor Moon spaghetti, the Asian girl photographing a classic Austin-Healey automobile in Montreal, the Kosuke Fujishima drawing of Natsumi Tsujimoto and Miyuki Kobayakawa getting out of their Honda Today mini-patrol car from the cover of the Laserdisc of the You're Under Arrest anime and my drawing of Natsumi Tsujimoto from the anime You're Under Arrest whacking Honda's Mr. Opportunity in the nuts with a baseball bat, and the completed version of my drawing of Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery in London.

Hopefully, some of those pictures will now show up in Google Image Search's next re-index. I can't guess when that would be. They seemed to be doing one every other month in the winter and early spring, with the last major re-index of the spring being in the middle of May, including pictures up through early April. Then several months went by without a re-index, until, at the end of August, there was a smaller re-index, including images through to the final week of April. The next re-index was the one I mentioned at the beginning of the article, at the end of September.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:03 PM