Sharing your Photography and Getting Feedback Pt 2

I listed a wide variety of options for photo sharing and critique in my previous post...and now, here's my purely biased set of concerns with many of the community sites.

The issue with most of the online community photo-sharing options, whether they feature competition and ratings or not, is that invariably, the number of people posting images far outnumbers the number of people with time to provide a thoughtful critique beyond "nice image" or "needs work". Many of the ratings oriented sites are ultimately reduced to community members providing what I call "drive-by ratings" i.e a score with no explanation or comment.

Also, the standards for judging and rating at many sites are rarely spelled out. What ends up happening is that the people who rate images and people who contribute images in a given community come to some sort of shared mutual understanding of what makes a good image, through waves and waves of images and corresponding ratings, with occasional references along the way to favorite photographers and influences as a comparison or baseline. In a worst case scenario, the majority gravitate to a lowest common denominator standard focused on restrictive rules that completely shortchanges risky or highly individual work.

Granted, an open-ended community approach can work reasonably with a smaller community such as the Contax G Pages. My experience is that communities, large or small, work best with a semi-stable foundation of open-minded contributors and a manageable number of images for people to look at. In reality, any community of reasonable size with owners of multiple types of cameras tends to be choked by waves of people who commit for only a limited period of time, and don't have time to critique or rate images thoughtfully.

As a result variable standards in ratings tend to prevail (in one six month period, members may like moody portraits, in another period, they may hate them and love landscapes, etc). Or the folks who run the site may decide to set rather rigid standards for what is good and what is bad, and give a core group of talented "regulars" who conform to the standards a lot of power -- this works well if you like the prevailing standards, but it's pretty awful in terms of the ability to appreciate work outside the norm.

While it sounds like I'm picking on ratings and award oriented sites, the problems I'm describing are not confined to online communities...they've long been prevalent in real world competitions and camera clubs as well. I actually have quite a bit of sympathy for judges who are confronted with an overwhelming variety of images and must set some criteria, however arbitrary. And I've been there, obsessing over competitions at sites like Digital Photo Contest, which features some very talented photographers...I remember winning my first Photo of the Day, and how it felt like winning the lottery.

In fact, for a number of people (particularly those who've never had exposure to situations requiring judgement with some structure, such as a classroom), I might recommend joining these sites and/or entering competitions...they do allow a photographer to escape the cozy trap of supportive friends and understand the dynamics behind how people establish a particular standard for quality. You do have to play to a particular audience, but the discipline enforced by tailoring one's images to these sites or competitions can prepare one well for the demands of some branches of professional photography (stock photography, commercial, editorial). And certainly, if you like the standards set by the winners and have those as a goal for your personal photography, you are set.

But I would have to say that at this stage in my personal development, and with exposure to sympathetic colleagues and teachers at school, that I've decided that the majority of online and offline camera clubs deal very poorly with work that doesn't fit their norms. In short, they don't work for me, and for that matter they don't work for a surprisingly number of colleagues I respect. This isn't sour grapes from someone who didn't win enough contests...I'll always respect and look in on the many members who contribute work to the best competition oriented sites out there. But I've seen too many people with distinct visions lost in the shuffle. There's a surprising amount of modest to outstanding work that isn't always pretty or technically correct, but has helped me see in a different way.

In this respect, I'm fortunate to be near a school that does have a broad range of raw and interesting work that's underrepresented at such sites (and that tends to be dismissed as student self-indulgence by those with more conventional aesthetics). I do like photo.net and their Photo of the Week, precisely because its judges ("the elves") play with conventional standards of picking winners and frequently pick technically imperfect images that provoke heated discussion. It's a big and sprawling site that has a good deal of interesting visions, though it requires work to navigate through...don't rely strictly on the ratings.

I haven't even talked about photoblogs much in the context of this discussion. The growing number of photoblogs, in all their chaos, have a great deal of potential, given the issues I've discussed. I'll talk more about what I find interesting about the concept and the reality of photoblogs, and why I decided to start my own blog, in a couple of days.