a photo finds its way home

In an earlier post, I mentioned my experience taking pictures at Bay to Breakers. In total, I snapped around 220 pictures with my camera for the day, mainly of random people on the street. After getting back to DC, I decided to conduct a small uncontrolled and unscientific experiment. What are the odds of me finding someone in one of my photos? After all, everyone was kind enough to let me take a picture of them without saying much of anything (other than a thank you and a peace sign), so maybe I could return the favor and give them a full resolution photo of their costumed self on the route.

Where else does one start on such a venture other than craigslist? I posted a short message on the San Francisco board a week ago.

I was on the Bay to Breakers route with a SLR camera in hand and a bottle of champagne under my left arm. Thank you everyone for all the great pictures! If you remember my lens in your face, I'd be happy to share a copy of the original file with you. If you have a short description of your costume, I'll be able to look for the photo pretty quickly, or at least get some candidate photos.

Keep in mind, craigslist does not allow posting links in the messages—so I wasn't able to pass a link to my Bay to Breakers flickr set out and have people sift. Within the weekend though, I received two replies, all the replies I would receive from this message. One reply asked if I saw a group of people in costumes reenacting human conception. Another reply asked if I took a picture of a green snail with a wig and a handmade shell. No dice. I flipped through all my pictures and I found neither costume. So I sent some disappointing replies, but passed on the link to my flickr photo set anyway, just in case they wanted to double check on their own.

The next day, eureka! Patricia, the one in the green snail outfit that I didn't spot, recognized her friends in one of the pictures—the runaway brides.



She passed my info along to Erin, one of the brides, who then requested the original resolution photo. I, of course, obliged and reunited the original photo with one of its subjects :)

If I remembered a little more from undergraduate probability class, maybe I could calculate the odds, but my mathematical intuition, which I rarely trust, tells me the odds are slim. I'm not sure how many people read the ad, but only two people responded. And within one degree (Patricia knowing Erin), we found someone in one of the 44 photos (I didn't post all 220) I had in my flickr set.

Ken → (craigslist) → Patricia → Erin

If anything, craigslist is kind of a shortcut (science nerds might call it a wormhole) through the social network where supposedly everyone is connected to everyone else by six degrees or less. Either that or craigslist just enables people to form a quick "A knows B" relationship in the social network. Ok, enough geeking out.

I'm just glad even one of the photographs found its way home.