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Comments
Then you said: "My performance on Flickr is more due to my networking skills than my photography skills."
Which means we do agree fundamentally - it is the 'you like mine and I'll like yours' Flickr mutual admiration society.
I'll happily continue to stick to my opinion and that of my club's selection committee regarding images that will win me or my club, or its members, competitions, accreditation or acclaim amongst national and international judges and respected peers over those who make their own rules which are designed to attract people to like a money making website.
An old Yorkshire saying If you win a competition the Judge was wonderful, If you got low marks, they were crap.
Do you agree that that sums it up?
If I was going to change that, I would permit the judges in each judging level to list a small number of "pros and cons" in writing without identifying who they were. I see the value of letting someone essentially say, "Did you think of that?" as a pro or con to point out as long as their is a mechanism to prevent their personality or prejudices from influencing the outcome. If there is only one judging level, it could be an initial comment phase followed by the judging phase.
As Spraynpray pointed out, in social media it is often a "you like mine and I'll like yours' Flickr mutual admiration society". Now that is true for somebody where the majority of their are returned favours - but those are easy to spot and unless you are spending a massive amount of time, that is not going to get you more than a few dozen and as soon as you stop, they go away. Social media relationships are ephemeral. With the exception of emailing about a dozen friends on Flickr, I have not had ANY interaction with my supporters on my main Flickr account that I usually post from here for at least two months. If I get 800 faves on one image and only 400 on another, that is a useful piece of information. On another account, I have even ensured that it is unable to get explored, to further increase the information value. I have engineered it to remove the social media noise. Here it is:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/westendfoto_ep/
The latest 18 pictures are uploaded at the same time every day. The only interaction that I otherwise have with this site is to answer questions in the comments. You can ignore the pictures that came before the 18. Those were images that I uploaded to generate the 2,000 followers that I decided I needed to produce a decent sample size and that was done in early March with no activity since. I have removed every photo from that period that is more interesting than the least interesting photo in the recently uploaded 18. That way I have an uncluttered list of those 18 images (growing by one per day) ranked in order of interestingness.
The purpose of this site is entirely different, which is where I typically post from:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/westendfoto/
The purpose is to obtain a large number of views for an image of my choosing. I have a dozen image with over a hundred thousand views. That is more than I will get in almost any photography exhibition that involves prints. The purpose is NOT to show my best work. That is the goal of my 500px site:
https://500px.com/westendfoto
Which is a work in progress.
Really though, try to do their job yourself - I have, it is very intense.
@WestEndFoto: I suppose I am saying that 'likes' or 'favs' or whatever have no great attraction for me. Maybe you are right when you say that if I put a lot of effort into it I would get more out of it, but I find that I am my own harshest critic and only take notice of a couple of excellent people in the genres interest me most.
I think Flickr is very useful, but only for my club's use. If I were not in a club I would probably use drop-box exclusively to share my snaps amongst my shooting buddies.
I smile when members of Camera Clubs complain about Judges, I say if you enter any competition you must accept the Judges comments. Sadly I have seen new members become very disheartend with a None positive criticism by a negative Judge to the point that they have never entered a competition again.
Many years ago when HDR came to the forefront I did enter a competition and did a HDR image, The Judge did nort know what HDR was and give me a 3 out of 20. However it was my turn to give the VOTs, Opportunity arose to get my own back, but I thanked him in civil way, unlike his judging.
Absolutely and totally. Rough with the smooth and all that! Actually I just won my clubs prestigious yearly trophy in spite of getting low scores from one judge in one of the comps so I'm happy. Actually, I got a photo in an exhibition, won the cup and got an accreditation all in the same month! It's been a good year for me so far with winning a regional comp too. We must have all the blind judges down here!
EDIT: A 3/20? that's unheard of!
Congratulations spraynpray on your success, more silver to clean.
One think I actually really enjoy about Flickr is looking at the work of other photographers. Over the last couple of years I have collected many of my personal favorites here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/westendfoto/galleries
I also really like 500px for this reason and the portrait work is generally better than Flickr.
Paulr, I see the same issue quite often and I left the club that was the worst offender in disgust. One of my clubs met today and their was a new member that joined (I saw him at the other club a while back but he never returned). He commented that in the other clubs, "they cannot talk about a photo without debating what to change". In your club, you guys are very technical and discuss how you did something and while you often debate what should be changed, you just as often judge an image as not in need of change."
NSXTypeR, the "viewship issue" applies to every situation in life. I am a professional accountant by training and member of the national board of a professional association for CFOs. I can tell you what one important difference between a successful CFO and "average accountant" often is. Often, the successful CFOs put them selves out in the public and develop relationships. They don't wait for the world to come to them. It is no different in photography. Joining a club and taking classes is an excellent way. If you want to play the social network game and have people see your images, you need to play the game by its rules. The "like and fave" issue may be a bit distasteful, but even in a photography club or even in life in general you have to play that game and I see nothing wrong with it as long are you are professional and genuine. When I ask accountants that are struggling to achieve a more senior role why they don't network more, they basically say the don't like the accounting version of "like and fave". They can't get past that and their career suffers.
If the way you imagine is distasteful to you, there might be other ways to do that. I am happy to discuss them if you wish.
Said:
NSXTypeR, the "viewship issue" applies to every situation in life. I am a professional accountant by training and member of the national board of a professional association for CFOs. I can tell you what one important difference between a successful CFO and "average accountant" often is. Often, the successful CFOs put them selves out in the public and develop relationships. They don't wait for the world to come to them. It is no different in photography.
I disagree with you on this statement. Networking in a corporate environment is very different from networking on Social Media such as Flickr (which what we are talking about). Networking in a corporate environment you have more indepth knowledge of the person that you are networking. In your case I think it would be rather foolhardy to network and support someone that did not have the skills or talent to succeed. You network with people that are going to e successful and that will give you the greatest chance of moving along with them as they succeed. When I was in the corporate world I was a Director of IT (Software development and Informatics) and reported to the CIO. I had to network with the CIO, CFO, COO and others. I worked with some very talented individuals and was always willing to support them and network for them. However, I did not network blindly. If there was a CIO, CFO, etc. that did not have the right skills or was going in the wrong direction I was not about to put my reputation and career on the line to support him or her. The same goes for providing recommendations for people or mentoring someone. I was and still very cautious about recommending someone as I am putting my seal of approval on them and stating that they have the skills and talent to succeed in position they are seeking. Social Media (Flickr) is entirely different. You are networking with people that you have a very limited knowledge of their skill level, you are basing it on what they present to you. The person could have taken the photo and did the post processing or they could be the person that did only the post processing and have no photography skills what so ever. In the corporate environment you network with others to help your manager or boss be successful. This doesn't exist in the Social Media environment you are networking to promote yourself and this is where I find fault and I this is where the "I like your if you like mine" mindset comes into play. If one of your followers came to you and wanted you to speak to one of their clients about how great of a photographer they are would you be willing to place your name and reputation on the line for them? I would have a hard time doing this even for someone as talented as Pitchblack as I have only seen his work and never worked with him (as you would in a corporate environment).
If Flickr or the photographers motivation is to display your work for others to see and like and express an opinion why is there a need for Explore? I have been on Flickr since Yahoo acquired them in 2005. I have had a professional account and several personal accounts. To this date I have never received one client that said I saw your work on Flickr and would like to hire you. I have more work than I can do and I am turning away clients every week and it has absolutely nothing to do with social media. I have a non existent social media profile and do not see the need to have one.
continued....
To be honest with you I am a bit confused about you post. In a early reply to a post of mine you made the statement that you are here to learn and grow your hobby but your posts seem to be that you are moving into being a professional. If photography is a hobby for you why do you care what others think of your work or how many photos you have in Explore. How many of your colleagues or friends know what Flickr is and what Explore is? Do they think less of your photos that you like that never made it to Explore? I doubt it. If you want to move to a professional level, I recommend that you find a professional (or a couple) that you respect and like their work that can work with or shadow. You will learn more from them in a few weeks that you will ever learn from Flickr or any other social media site and you will be able to spend more time taking photos rather than trying to mine data from Flickr's database.
To be clear I am not saying Flickr does not have value. I think we have been talking about different values. I do not think Flickr (and 500px, etc.) provide any value in determining quality of your photo. I do think it provides value in sharing your photos and for storage.
Then they check out Nikon Rumours and take a look. What do they see? An article on Flickr. They see a lot of negative comments about Flickr such as "Computers can't understand 'art' and they never will. They don't have emotion so in my humble opinion 'explore' is a marketing tool designed to catch the desperate."
I can only imagine what goes through the mind of a prospective Nikon Rumours participant, "This site isn't for me. They think I am desperate and it is the moderator that said it to boot. The moderator that sees social media as a bulletin board at best and obviously does not understand it or people like me who participate in it"
So what is Nikon Rumours supposed to accomplish? Do we want to be a bunch of angry old white men that learned photography on plastic coated with a gelatin emulsion? That is fine, but there are not many customers down that road.
I assume that Nikon Rumours is a business. And a business wants customers. Like it or not, the world has been changed forever by the likes of Facebook, Instagram and yes, Flickr and 500px. We can hide in our little corner of the internet, denigrate the choices that the vast majority make and talk to ourselves while our numbers happily dwindle into obscurity.
Or we can accept different views with an open mind, embrace that big world out there, even social media, and turn Nikon Rumours into a positive community that is well respected and seen as a thought leader by many.
And Spraynpray, the role of a moderator in this scenario is to promote that discussion with the objective of finding new truth, even from the likes of Ken Rockwell, not advance your own agenda and insult half the internet in the process. Actually, that is the role of a moderator in any scenario. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_moderator
Sorry to be so hard hitting - especially to you Spraynpray. I suspect that you have been thrust into a position that you don't really want to be in. But I care about Nikon Rumours and I sense that the participation and enthusiasm of the members has dwindled. I sense that a significant part of the reason is as I have described above. If I have played a role in that, and I may have with my uncompromising attitude, I regret that.
Well:
1.
It is different from what I do all day.
2.
It is social - one reason I like portraits.
3.
It is hard.
4.
It is an interesting combination of technical, science and art.
5.
It is endlessly diverse.
But you are probably looking for a response like:
1.
I like making beautiful images (note that any resemblance of an image I make to reality is an accident).
2.
I like looking at beautiful images taken by other people.
3.
I like capturing and documenting my experiences. Reality is important here, but I enjoy doing it more if I allow myself to indulge in #1.
4.
I want people to see my work.
And since this is a social media discussion, I will speak to social media in the context of the above.
#1 - Given my #2, social media (Flickr, 500px, Nikon Rumours etc.) is an excellent source of ideas. Sorry guys, Nikon Rumours is social media.
#2:
I use Flickr for this. There are usually some beautiful images in Explore, especially the first 50 or so images. I follow a few thousand people that make beautiful images. A few hundred of them are really really good. I also use the gallery feature in Flickr, which allows me to bookmark and organize my favorite images (favorites is for marketing, not favorites). 500px is even better, though I am not as organized on that platform.
#3.
I have created this Flickr account specifically for this purpose:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/travel_by_westendfoto/albums
#4.
Where else can I get a million views of my work a month from every corner of the globe? And with only about two hours of work per month to boot! Now I am not sure that a million views on Flickr is really a million views. I don't think that it is easy for a website to really record how hard somebody looks at something. But however much you discount it, it is still a lot. Being in the top 5 on Explore gets me 70,000 views on a bad day.
Now I don't imagine for a minute that being in Explore actually means that I have the best images. However, show my a photographer that doesn't want their work to be seen, and I will show you a businessman that doesn't care how much money he makes (actually, there are quite a few of both, but that is a different story outside the scope of this discussion).
And I stand by my earlier comment that it is possible to obtain constructive criticism from Flickr. Except for some people that I have developed relationships with and correspond with using Flickrmail, it won't come from specific comments. But when an image that I predicted would obtain 400 faves gets a thousand, I take a good hard look at the image and give it due consideration. There is usually a learning there. The same applies when I only get 300 faves when I expected more. It is also insightful when an image with only 300 faves is deemed to be more interesting than an image with 600 faves. There is more going on in Explore besides counting faves. With patience there is a learning here also. Now this is not as good as the feedback that I get from people I correspond with or my photography program instructors. But I am not saying it is that. I am simply saying that if you put some thought into it and have the patience to create a process that produces a lot of data, there is a way to extract information.
said
"So what is Nikon Rumors supposed to accomplish? Do we want to be a bunch of angry old white men that learned photography on plastic coated with a gelatin emulsion? That is fine, but there are not many customers down that road."
You have no idea what you are talking about. If being a bunch of angry old white men is based on people that do not agree with your point of view then sign me up, except I am not that much older than you. I am white but I have no clue what that has to do with this topic and I am not angry. Concerning those of us that "learned photography on plastic coated with a gelatin emulsion" I am guilty and more perplexing I am a guest lecturer at Duke University and Savannah College of Art and Design and I teach young men and women of all races film photography, including large format. SCAD requires all students seeking a degree in Photography to take their Large Format Photography class (one of the classes I lecture). Their Print Making class (one of the classes I lecture) focuses on the process of developing and printing film. The student I work with are eager to learn and most either own their own film cameras before coming to school or acquire one shortly after using the cameras we provide. I see them walking around campus with their film cameras taking photos because they like what they get. Duke also requires their students receiving a degree in Photography to learn and use medium and large format film cameras and one of their senior projects requires portraits taken with a large format camera. There is a resurgence of photographers using film and they span the range of age and race. You can ignore it or chose not to believe it but it is true.
Spraynpray is right. If he is wrong do some research and prove him wrong. In just a few minutes I found a few articles related to computers assessing image quality and aesthetics.
"Aesthetics, in the world of art and photography, refers to the principles of the nature and appreciation of beauty. Judging beauty and other aesthetic qualities of photographs is a highly subjective task. Hence, there is no unanimously agreed standard for measuring aesthetic value. In spite of the lack of firm rules, certain features in photographic images are believed, by many, to please humans more than certain others. In this paper, we treat the challenge of automatically inferring aesthetic quality of pictures using their visual content as a machine learning problem, with a peer-rated online photo sharing Website as data source. We extract certain visual features based on the intuition that they can discriminate between aesthetically pleasing and displeasing images. Automated classifiers are built using support vector machines and classification trees. Linear regression on polynomial terms of the features is also applied to infer numerical aesthetics ratings. The work attempts to explore the relationship between emotions which pictures arouse in people, and their low-level content. Potential applications include content-based image retrieval and digital photography."
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11744078_23#page-1
Objective Photographic Image quality consist of the following: Sharpness, Noise, Dynamic range, Tone reproduction, Contrast, Color accuracy, Distortion, Vignetting, Exposure accuracy, Lateral chromatic aberration (LCA), Lens flare, Color moiré, Artifacts, etc. These can be measured by a computer to some degree.
"Subjective measures of quality also relate to the fact that, although the camera's deviation from the ideal models of image formation and measurement in general is undesirable and corresponds to reduced objective image quality, these deviations can also be used for artistic effects in image production, corresponding to high subjective quality." This is a quote from the Wikipedia article and cannot be measured by a computer.
An image can have exceptional objective photographic image qualities but can be unappealing to the human eye due to poor subjective image quality factors.
"Then they check out Nikon Rumors and take a look. What do they see? An article on Flickr. They see a lot of negative comments about Flickr such as "Computers can't understand 'art' and they never will. They don't have emotion so in my humble opinion 'explore' is a marketing tool designed to catch the desperate."
I can only imagine what goes through the mind of a prospective Nikon Rumors participant, "This site isn't for me. They think I am desperate and it is the moderator that said it to boot. The moderator that sees social media as a bulletin board at best and obviously does not understand it or people like me who participate in it""
That's only one side of the story. Imagine the Flickr user that does not understand the rules and is posting great images and they never make it to Explore. They see photos that make it that are inferior to their work. They are just as frustrated. They come to Nikon Rumors and see a discussion about the pros and cons of Flickr and the algorithm for getting into Explore. Nikon Rumors is providing them with information they can chose to use or not to achieve the much pined for Explore.
"And Spraynpray, the role of a moderator in this scenario is to promote that discussion with the objective of finding new truth, even from the likes of Ken Rockwell, not advance your own agenda and insult half the internet in the process."
How many people do think you offended by the statement? "Do we want to be a bunch of angry old white men that learned photography on plastic coated with a gelatin emulsion? That is fine, but there are not many customers down that road." Why would a woman want to be a part of Nikon Rumors after a statement like that? I am offended.
I was on the Duke campus today giving a lecture on camera movements techniques on large frame cameras. I asked the student what they thought of Flickr and only a few new what it was and the ones that did know about it said they knew because their parents used it. I asked what the use and Instagram was the clear winner and a number said they used 500px for their showcasing their work. Many of them said they use Snapchat but not in the way that they use Instagram. I showed them the blog and they thought you were a cyber bully and that your uncompromising approach was offensive.
"Where else can I get a million views of my work a month from every corner of the globe?"
Flickr may be the place for you. It's not for me. For example the following photo has been used on several TV shows, Concert promotions and websites. Just on the Treehouse Masters show original airing there were 1.5 million viewers in the US alone.
I do not believe you for a minute that you take constructive criticism from Flickr. I have reviewed a number of your photos and I have not seen a single negative or constructive comment. Pitchblack and others here have provided you positive and constructive criticism that you have ignored or blew off as I like color. I refuse to compromise my integrity and photographic technique by having to saturate and over process the crap out of my photos or use some silly workflow to make it into Explore. The exclusive rights for the photo above sold well into the 5 figures, royalties for each airing and the photo session itself was in 5 figures. That's all of the positive feedback that I need. Pitchblack nailed the problem with Nikon Rumors, the incessant posting of people that do not know what they are talking about and the moderators not correcting them results in the site losing credibility. In one of the post you argued that the D800 frame rate cannot increase by switching to DX or by using the battery pack. The user manual clearly states that the different rates. I think the user manual is correct. I also think you are doing more damage by posting super saturated and over processed images to the new people coming to Nikon Rumors than you realize. Failing to develop the basic skills and learning how to use your camera and not rely on post processing to save your butt is a self-defeating process and confuses new users trying to learn. I am uncompromising when it comes to quality but I am always willing to learn from my students, other photographers, artists and others. Failing to do so I would still be taking photos that look like the ones that I took when I started at the age of 12.
I am going the route of Pitchblack. I feel that my time and efforts are better spent elsewhere.
@SpraynPray you can ban or disable my account.
In any event if there are 3 people having a discussion on the Internet there are at least 4 opinions
Another important topic might be "which photo sites allow me to retain as much of my intellectual property and rights". Some of the sites your students use like snapchat and Instagram have horrible license agreements from a "retention of rights" perspective.
Glad to see you've judged an entire community by one member.
I do not think it is up to you to tell me what I should or should not be offended by. I do agree with you about the topic and the topics you suggested would be better topics.
My students use Instagram and Snapchat to direct their followers to their websites. Both schools require them to learn who to build and maintain a website and most have a site by their junior year and required to have one in their senior year. They rarely post a high quality photo on either one but will post a link to their website or if they are exhibiting a link to the exhibition site with the date and time. Many professional photographers are doing the same thing. Danny Clinch, Heather Thomas and Dave Black are a few that I follow that to the same thing. You are right about the licensing but I would include all of the Social Media sites have similar issues. Flickr has issues that they have been aware of for some time now that they have not fixed. 500px also has a number of lawsuits against them for licensing and copyright infringement.
I am not judging the entire community. As I stated above I had rather be taking photos and working with my students and others that want to learn and teach me new stuff every time I work with them.
Computers can't understand 'art' and they never will. They don't have emotion so in my humble opinion 'explore' is a marketing tool designed to catch the desperate.
So after being called desperate, what was my next post? You will see that I ignored the fact that I was called desperate and addressed the first point in the post. Despite the fact that rightly or wrongly I understood this comment to be a condescending deliberate insult (I think everyone here knows that I exploit social media quite extensively), I chose to ignore that.
Can anybody identify something I said on the first page that attacked anybody. Was I really vehemently defending my position?
The next comment (first on second page) says:
I'll happily continue to stick to my opinion and that of my club's selection committee regarding images that will win me or my club, or its members, competitions, accreditation or acclaim amongst national and international judges and respected peers over those who make their own rules which are designed to attract people to like a money making website.
The bold part here sounds like a veiled insult to me. The non bold part seems fair to me.