Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012
Some days I just don’t feel like carefully picking out a photo. Some days I want to just pick at random.
So today, I did.
Well, not completely random. I chose by scrolling up and down randomly in the folder of photos I had open. That meant I limited my choices to that one folder from the first move, cutting out some 90% of my photos from consideration.
This selection method also inclined me to not pick near the top or the bottom. I tended to scroll the opposite direction when I saw I was getting close to one of the extremes, just because it was mildly jarring when the screen stops scrolling when you hit the end. Also, the random up-and-down method tends to have you spend a lot of time in the central third of the folder, purely because to get from the top to the bottom you must pass through the center, but to get to the center from either the top or the bottom does not require passing through their opposite.
I was doing something similar on a smaller scale for deciding which exact photo I’d choose in the row of images. I was wiggling my mouse back and forth as the images scrolled by, but again, tended to veer away from the edges and tend towards the center.
So, how random was this? Well, I selected a photo a bit less than two thirds of the way down in the folder, well within that comfortable range I was frequently covering. And it was the third photo out of seven in its row. Again, centralized.
I guess this isn’t a very random method after all. Such a pity. Perhaps I’ll have to play with a number generator next time or something.
Until then, enjoy this not-so-random photo of the cliffs of the Yellowstone River Canyon!
