2022
36 Walk Global Recap
Make sure you read Part 2 and Part 3 with the recaps of the cities! I could not put it all in one article it was too big. Links at the end of this article.
A bit about me & photography
Hi, I’m Paul Pavlinovich the supported community moderator for Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been into photography seriously since 1982 year 10 in high school. I was inspired by my father who always had a camera with him and produced beautiful images of everything we travelled to see. Once I was old enough I learned that we travelled as a family so he could photograph things.
In today’s photography we have the world at our fingertips, people think nothing of shooting 1,000 shots on a day out picking a few to keep as memories. Coming from a film background where every frame had a real monetary value I know how to operate in a constrained environment now that I’m in digital. I’m no stranger to that 1,000 shot day but periodically I constrain myself to 36: the number of frames commonly found on 35mm film during the time frame in which I started. My start was in black and white basic 35mm film. Dad was quite proud that I was getting into his hobby and saved for a long time to buy my first camera, an East German Praktika. This clunky old beast was a lot of fun although it certainly had drawbacks. You had about an 80% chance of the film actually taking up and about a 50% chance of zero light leaks. I grew to love light leaks and what they do to pictures.
I would charge my own film canisters from a bulk roll and load the camera. When done I would usually not even bother rewinding but would put the camera, a developing tank, spool and scissors into the dark bag to load the spool and get it into the light proof tank. For the next twenty minutes or so you’d run through developer, stop and finally fix before you had any idea if you even had any pictures at all. Once the film was developed you’d open the tank and hang it up to dry. Leaving it overnight was the best bet to make sure the chemical coating hardened properly so you’d not scratch it in the enlarger. You’d get the negative into a negative pocket bag so you could make your contact print. This would be exposed by placing the negatives onto a 8x11 sheet of paper and exposing to the bright enlarger light then developing. This contact sheet gave you a feel for each of the images and “told” you how to process each shot that you wanted to make a print of. I’ve still got all those negative pocket bags! Hundreds of them! I used to make around 2,000 negatives per year and around 1,000 of those made it into print. Today I shoot an average of 20,000 images per year a third of those coming from model shoots, a third from organised photowalks and a third coming from photography I do by myself.
The genesis of The 36 Walk
How did we end up world wide with Google Local Guides?
For the last few years I’ve been a member of the Local Guides program and have been the supported community moderator of Melbourne for few years. This year the little idea of the 36 came up and I thought that perhaps I could marry it to Local Guides as a way to help people improve their photography for Google Maps. A lot of people contribute photos to Maps and we’ve all been guilty of the questionable images. I thought the 36 idea would help to improve this situation and would be a great way to have some fun meet-ups around the world promoting Local Guides. We all like to make our little mark on the world, something that outlives us and continues. My photography is that for me, and perhaps through 36 it will become that for other people.
Earlier in the year I approached Googler Traci Cappiello to pitch the idea of a global 36 walk to see if the Local Guides team thought it was something they would be interested in supporting. The outcome was a resounding yes. At about the same time the new meet-up https://maps.google.com/localguides/meetup system launched and we decided to use this as the main platform for the walks to get organised. Initially I thought maybe two or three walks would run in addition to my own Melbourne 36 via people that I knew. The grand plan that I have to admit wasn’t geared up for a big response was to have people apply to lead a walk via a Google Form and I would contact them and verify they were legit and then create a meet-up in the new system for them. The first few came in and there were some teething problems around time zones with the meet-up system. Googler Jess Safir worked with me to resolve this problem and we put the first few in. We also encountered an issue with how the meet-up system filtered the allowable locations to businesses which was causing a back and forth with walk leaders to change their starting points. Again Jess worked with me to resolve this and off we went. The timezone issue was mostly addressed but the occasional slip caused a change in approach to have the approved walk leaders lodge their own meet-ups. I can’t thank Jess enough for all her help with the meet-ups.
The idea really took off, the launch article was featured on Local Guides Connect for a week or so as a banner on the front page and seemed to resonate with people as both the comments were favourable and the registrations of potential walk leaders went through the roof. Around 40 people applied to lead walks and of those once they found out more information about the idea 25 elected to go ahead, there were last minute additions of another three making the final city count 28. The walks were made public both via the meet-ups embedded within the Google Maps product and Local Guides Connect and using the Google My Maps product https://www.google.com/mymaps using a public My Map https://goo.gl/zw7lyt all of the cities that were listed on the MyMap did end up running walks and most of them have shared images where I’ve been able to find them using the #localguides #36photo and #36photo2017 tags. Many of these have been reshared from the 36 Walk page on Google Plus (yes it does still exist, no it isn’t a ghost town) https://plus.google.com/+The36AnnualPhotowalk
Getting things organised in the lead up to the walk day of April 23rd was challenging because anticipating only a small response I didn’t build up a team of helpers and had to process all of the requests myself. The choice of getting the walk leaders to lodge their own meet-ups took much of this pressure off allowing me to concentrate on planning my own 36 walk.
The final list of 2017 cities in registration order was
Melbourne, Australia with Paul Pavlinovich
San Francisco, United States of America with Atul Chaudhari (replacing Roxanne Overton who had to pull out for family reasons)
New York, United States of America with Fred Alluso
Kapenguria Town, Kenya with Jonas Kibet
Engu, Nigeria with Nkenna Aneke
Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka with Anuradha Piyadasa
Sydney/Milsons Point, Australia with Alex Griffith
Pribham, Czechia with Zdenek Horak (Tenvelkej)
Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina with Farid Monti
Rome, Italy with Lucio Virzi
Lansing, United States of America with Ken Whitinger
Guadalajara, Mexico with Alejandro Villa Renteria
Melbourne, Australia with Thomas Hayes
Perth, Australia with Rob Masters
Nairobi, Kenya with Robert Opiyo
Comilla, Bangladesh with Shafiul Bashar
Surubaya, Indonesia with Ahadin Fahmi
Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka with Ilankovan Thushyantha
Ajah, Lagos with Chim Chiez
Brisbane, Australia with Trace McLean
Venice Beach / LA, United States of America with Roberto James (Jeannette G?)
Kansas City, Kansas, United States of America with William Rock
Tokyo, Japan with Gyuzel Sapyazova
Sidoarjo, Indonesia with Ahadin Fahmi
Manchester, England, United Kingdom with Adrian Lunsong
Bheemili Beach, India with Abhinav kumar
