Picture this

So we had our trip to Quebec City (see some photos here) last weekend. It was a great weekend in several respects -- we had a lot of R&R and great meals (we definitely highly recommend the hotel and will be staying there again), spent a lot of time just wandering the city and enjoying some quality time together, the train is a great and relaxing way to travel, and the highlight, of course, was seeing my photo in the exhibition at the museum. I had prepared myself to be disappointed, as they had told me the photo would be in the "interactive area," which I suspected meant that it would be manipulated beyond recognition or part of a collage or mosaic or cut up and put back together in a weird way, or something. But as soon as we walked into the exhibition I could see it across the room, in all its glory.



It was on a flat screen set into a display case, and part of a series of scrolling photos of different cityscapes. So while Serdic acted as my accomplice and stood between me and the guard and blocked her view, I quickly snapped off a couple of photos of my photo (how meta!). The only disappointment was that instead of using my name as the photo credit, as I had been told they would, they gave the source instead, the URL for my Flickr account. Still cool, but not *as* cool as seeing my name there would have been. But it was still a pretty awesome moment, to stand there in the museum and see my photo scroll by. Several times, of course. And then we went back to see it again before we left. *sheepish grin*

So then we came home, thinking it was a once in a lifetime event and weren't we glad we had made the effort, and so on and so forth. And two days later I got an email, via Flickr, from an editor at http://www.schmap.com/, which is an online travel guide run by Yahoo! (who, not so coincidentally, also run Flickr), asking if I would grant permission for one of the photos I took in Italy last spring to be used in their latest publication. I did, of course, and it appeared online on Friday. (Here's a screencap.) This time they used my name in the credit line. ;-)

So, interesting times. As I said before, I've always thought I took nice photos, but I never thought other people (besides friends and family) would be interested in them! It's not like I'm ready to quit my day job (hell, no one's offered to pay me for anything yet!) and take up photography as a career, but it's still been a nice little ego boost in the last few months. In both cases, interestingly, the photos selected have not been the ones I would have chosen, or ones that I would rank among the best pictures I've ever taken. But I guess in both cases they were an unusual angle and not the stereotypical "tourist" shot (I mean, I took some gorgeous photos of, for example, the Rialto Bridge in Venice, but everyone who has ever visited Venice has the same shots in her photo album!). Either way, it's been kind of fun.