My photograph was displayed in a museum in Switzerland and all I got was this fuzzy picture

Several years ago, a few of my photos were published in magazines and regional travel guides. Back then, you needed to request editorial calendars from the publisher, find and/or take photos that fit within the topics on the publishers’ lists, prepare portfolios of slides (making sure you sent high quality duplicates, not the originals), send them to the publisher 100 or so at a time, then wait several months to hear back. If you experienced the average success rate, you would sell one photograph for every hundred or so that you submitted. It was a lot of work to have your photos viewed by the world – and a limited viewing at that.

Digital media has changed all that. Within minutes of uploading a picture to this blog or my account at Flickr, the photo is instantly viewable to the world via the network of links here or by RSS feeds. To date, my photos have received more than 100,000 views.

The Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland is exploring the impact of digital media in making photography accessible to the world. The museum’s current exhibit, ‘We are all photographers now!’ explores the issues related to millions of daily image uploads to the internet. The museum also offers photographers a chance to participate in the exhibit by uploading photos to their website. Photos are selected and put on display for a day. One of mine was selected and displayed last week. The museum sent the low-res photo, above, as proof. The exhibit runs through May.

You can see a much better version of Moonrise.