Sad Flickr Story

As you know, I'm a big fan of Flickr. Besides being a useful picture repository and a great place to host images for blogging, I enjoy participating in various Flickr groups. It's humbling to see all the wonderful, creative photos people take. However, it's a good way to learn and hopefully improve my photo skills.

I've made a few contacts there as well. It's not the social network that a site like MyBlogLog provides, but you can find and connect with folks. You're able to keep track of new photos posted by your contacts. One contact I've mentioned before is carlosluis. He has an amazing photographic ability -- especially with portraits and action shots of his kids. He had posted a wonderful collection of photos that captured the activities of his son and daughter as they were growing up.

"Had" is the operative word in the previous sentence. Tonight I noticed two images he recently posted contained words instead of an image. I thought that was strange. When I went to his photo pool I noticed all his images were gone and only 4 remained. The images were messages to folks looking at his photo collection that explain why Carlos made all his photos private. The reason Carlos mentioned (see the comments on the pixelated photo and his recent self portrait) is that the photos of his daughter were being used by someone else to make up a story about an adopted daughter on a myspace profile. That's disturbing to me -- I can't imagine how upsetting that discovery was to Carlos!!

It's sad to read stories like this. It explains why bloggers like Julie Leung don't have photos of her children on her blog.

I hope he'll at least post his nature photos. He has some incredible photos of hummingbirds he took while they were near feeders they had outside their window. My best wishes to Carlos.