This weekend, I will photograph the Fremont Solstice Parade and the Solstice Cyclists from the 12th year in a row. These two related but separate events are glorious local tradition of joy, creativity, and public nudity. In years past, I’d upload all my Solstice photos to a public gallery. Other users could comment on the photos and add them to collections. Wow, did I see a lot of disgusting, disrespectful comments and photo collections! Alas, creeps & voyeurs use this glorious event, which should be about freedom & joy & self-expression, to make the nude cyclists uncomfortable.
Privacy for nudists
Thus my quest to make my photos invisible to the general public, but easily accessible to people I photograph in passing. One year, I put all my photos on my own website and only posted the link on the private e-mail list for the Solstice Cyclists. Someone on that list made a publicly-accessible page of links that included my private link. Apparently I can’t share things in confidence, even on that private e-mail list. Another year I put all my photos on my own website, but this time the only place the address appeared was on contact cards that I gave out at the event. My website’s logs indicated a lot of traffic to certain images, so someone probably shared links to them. I could guarantee that no one could publicize someone else’s photo by delivering all photos via e-mail, but many Solstice Cyclists prefer to remain anonymous and don’t want to give out their e-mail addresses to photographers they’ve just met.
So how can I deliver photos only to the people in the photos without getting contact information from those people? My solution this year is to pass out unique contact cards to each person I photograph. Each card will have a different URL printed on it. When I hand out a card, I’ll take a picture of the card and its recipient. When I process photos later, this will tell me which photos to upload to which URL. The URLs are generated from a large list of English words, so they will be easy to remember and type. The word list is large enough that it won’t be easy to guess someone else’s word from looking at your own. The words aren’t all colors, or names of birds, or adjectives. If people lose their cards, they won’t be able to find their photos, but previous solutions had the same problem. Nude people rarely have pockets, but people in previous years have stuffed cards into socks, bags, helmets,etc. If they have phones, but no pockets, they can photograph the card & keep a virtual copy.
Generating the cards
I obtained a list of 1000 words from a site for crossword puzzle enthusiasts. I read through the list and removed any words with possible negative connotations, like “bizarre”, “murderer”, “chunk”, and so on. That left me with about 730 words.
In a word processor, I made a mockup of the contact card, using the longest possible word in the URL to make sure it would fit on one line. Once I had one card, I copied-and-pasted dozens of times to make sure it would fill up one page and wrap to the text properly. I had to adjust spacing and font size a few times, but I ended up with a card that would print 16 to a page.
I wrote a python script that would pick a word from the word list, insert it into the text of the card, and write that to a file. One loop for 10 pages and another loop for 16 cards per page, and I had a text file with 160 unique URLs. I copy-and-paste that into the word processor with my carefully tuned formatting, and everything lines up. It’s so nice to see rows and rows of identical text, except it’s not quite identical. Every card has a slightly different URL. Print and cut and I’m ready for the parade!