How Do You Share Your Photographs and Grow as a Photographer?

Seems like both a very basic question and a complex one...given the sheer variety of options out there to show someone your images. Since I've caught on to the phenomenon of the photoblog recently, and I've been actively involved in sharing images in various ways since I got into photography heavily four years ago, it's an interesting question to ponder.

In a general sense, the news is all good. Improving digital capture technology along with faster computers and increased broadband penetration means people can upload images easily, get good quality reprints, and enjoy a better online viewing experience for photography overall.

But I'm thinking beyond the sharing of snapshots...what fanatical amateurs and pros do to show their images to friends and colleagues as they attempt to share their passion for photography, and develop as photographers and artists. Even the most hermetic artist eventually seeks an audience, a friend, or heck, at least another set of eyes. Aspirations can range from simply gaining a virtual social network around one's hobby, getting more enjoyment out of the hobby, gaining more technical knowledge, developing one's own vision or artistic voice, or making a career out of photography. Or all of the above.

The ways of sharing photographs I'm most familiar with are the following:

1) A personal web page with one's own web server, or the use of hosted galleries (pbase being particularly popular)

2) Rating and competition-oriented online forums, such as photo.net, photosig, usefilm, photoblink, and many, many others. Typically, community members submit images for ratings by other community members, but there may also be judges who provide ratings and choose an image for Photo of the Day, Month, etc.

3) General photo-sharing forums that are non-ratings and non-competition oriented, as part of a broader photography web site. I'm only familiar with the Samples and Galleries forum on DPReview, but there may be others where comments are more general and less oriented toward quantitative critiques.

4) Equipment Specific Sites, for example, enthusiast sites meant for owners of Nikon or Canon or Leica cameras. These sites are more focused heavily on discussions of one's gear, but there's usually a general photosharing forum...in fact, DPReview has forums devoted to specific manufacturers which are very popular for the techheads. A variation on the focus on manufacturers can be a focus on a type of equipment or specific photographic process i.e. toy camera sites or sites devoted to large format.

Oddly, I've found that sites in this category can actually be friendlier venues for sharing images, even with their equipment bias, given the inherent "common ground" around brand or process (photographers can be notoriously parochial regarding their cameras and lenses, a subject for another discussion). Some sites can even present consistently thoughtful and interesting photography, such as The Contax G Pages, featuring the photography of owners of Contax G1 and G2 rangefinders.

(One of the first images I submitted to the Contax G site)

And those are just the online options! People have obviously been sharing photographs with peers and mentors for longer than the World Wide Web's been around, and the most common methods I've encountered for people to share photographs and get feedback in the real world are:

6) Informal networks of photographer friends or colleagues (like my Tuesday night dinner group).

7) Photography Schools, such as NESOP, where one more explicitly pursues education in different areas of photography and gains a network at the school. Adult education schools with arts programs and photography courses also fit in this category.

8) Photo seminars/workshops, such as Cape Cod Workshops or Santa Fe Workshops, which are a lot like schools, though are typically more constrained from a time and topic perspective (a day, a week focused on landscapes, nudes, etc)

9) Camera Clubs, which may be one of the oldest networks of photographers around.

I'm generalizing broadly even as I list all these options, as there are more variants than I can list on these models, such as private tutoring (both online and offline), correspondence courses (New York Institute of Photography being most well-known), and even retail pricing for photo critiques for the feedback-starved.

All these options for sharing and learning are not mutually exclusive, of course, and many colleagues I know float between different forums, maintain their own web sites, or at least drop images into a series of pbase albums around loose themes, and will take the occasional class or workshop.

Beyond the large number of online galleries people have as showcases or just online storage cabinets, ratings and competition oriented sites seem to be highly popular, just as camera clubs have always been hugely popular in the real world. I've participated actively in a few of the ratings sites myself. While there's a great deal of good photography at these sites, these fora have significant limitations, which I'll talk more about in my next post.