Photochaining (outdoors)
Well, it doesn’t have to be outdoors, but I had to have a way to distinguish one kind of photochaining from the other. “Outdoors” seemed to be the best short descriptor. Anyway…
If you’re starting a chain, begin with #1. If you’re finding a card already in the chain, skip that step!
- get a cheap memory card (as of June 2010, you can get a gigabyte for about two dollars. However, many people have an old one laying around, probably because they bought a larger one than the one that came with their camera in the first place).
- put a note and/or label on the card to let the finder know what’s up. A post-it probably won’t do it, unless yours are WAY stickier than mine. Feel free to use the name of this site if you like, or abbreviate the idea much better than I’ve been able to do so far (I’m long-winded, I know…)
- take some pictures! No real problem there, though you may want to keep in mind a few things:
- there’s really no guarantee someone won’t just take the card and keep it for themselves. So don’t take any pictures that you can’t live without, obviously.
- no matter what happens, the pictures will end up in the public domain. Be smart, be safe, be sensible about what you photograph…and be prepared just in case it goes viral (not likely, but it could happen…)
- on the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily have to be totally anonymous. If you like your face, your house, your car, go right ahead and put it in the picture. I’d personally hesitate to show addresses, license plates, that sort of thing, but maybe I’m just paranoid.
- not only that, it can be a more meaningful variation of the idea to ask the photographers to take a picture of a specific location, showing where they found the card (or where they left it!). Twists like this bring the idea closer to geocaching (which we’ll discuss on another page, if we have time…)
Frame that photo and when you’re ready to move it to your new place, check out Oasis Moving and Storage.
