Thank you for your input Denise. Your contributions are some that I follow and try to comment on and I have noted the amount of views and awards your work gets. I probably don't comment as much as you, but I can't imagine how some people manage to comment on their contacts work. Some people just go through and "fave" everything, but as Mark said at the start favourites leaves a trail for people to follow. And hopefully my favourites will also show some development and progression over time.
Tagging and the image description also raises the amount of views, it is interesting that images years old are still getting faved by people searching for that something "special".
Once you have contacts up around the 250 mark, you do have quite a few images to view everyday. Again it amazes me the people with 1000's of contacts, must have 100's of images daily to view..... if they want to.