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Always looking back by A Marques

The advent of social networks has been a huge buzz around the internet for years. Primarily through open forums and later in sites like digg.com, del.icio.us, and of course the latest photographyVoter.com (dedicated to photography), social networking has fulfilled a gap that existed for long: the ability to judge internet content. Also, finding like-minded individuals allows for a great exchange of ideas and discussion.

Social photography-sharing networks are a slice of this pie. In sites like flickr and photobucket anyone can upload their work and open it to the masses. Like mostly everything, these social photography-sharing networks have advantages and disadvantages. In this post I’ll cover what are for me the main 5 advantages of uploading your work to social networks.

5 Pros of Social Photography-Sharing Networks

1. Exposure - Your photos don’t need to rest in the hard-drive anymore without anyone to look at them. These networks allow for it to go global. Thousands of people can look at your work and admire what you can do with a camera. Your name in photography can be known.

2. Feedback - You think your photos are good. But does everyone else? Commenting on posted work is a very much used feature on these sites. You’ll receive feedback from potentially thousands of other users, and some comments can help you improve your technique and generally advance your knowledge on photography.

3. Visitors - With some of your photos in the social networks, if you edit your profile well and make it interesting, with a link to your main gallery outside the social network, you can get traffic to your own website.

4. Easiness - How more easy can it be? Tell the site where your photos are on your physical drive, add tags and descriptions and the site does everything else for you. Very soon you’ll see your photos displayed on your own gallery with everything else setup for you.

5. Fun - Interacting with other people is fun. Tracking the works of friends or users who’s work you admire is fun. Joining groups inside the social network and exchanging ideas and discussing projects is fun.

I hope this list has helped you see the good side about social photography-sharing networks. But not everything is this sweet. There is a dark side to it too.

Tomorrow I will post again addressing this issue but I’ll be looking at it from the other side with the 5 Cons of Social Photography-Sharing Networks.

And you? Do you use any of the most popular social photography-sharing networks? What do you see as the main advantages of such sites?

Gravity by A Marques

“What Photography is/means to you?” is the name of a new series of posts I’ll be trying to implement here.

My objective is to get out of the box and start listening to what other amateur of professionals have to say about photography.

What photography as art, hobby or source of income really is and means to everyone who makes the craft of capturing light a big part of their world.

To achieve this goal of mine, and of course to make it available to everyone who reads my words, I’ll be contacting some photographers (amateurs and professionals) who have some work available online and ask them this same question: “What photography is/means to you?”. What they have to say will be posted here together with links to the galleries so that you can see for yourself how the images and words complement each other. This should also provide an interesting source for discussions and sharing of ideas.

For those of you who didn’t get an email from me, or you were faster than me, and you want to be featured in “words: irrational”, please leave your contact in the comments (email address and/or link to website where your work is available) and express your desire in sharing your thoughts and I’ll do my best to contact you asap with further instructions.

Let us share the world and words of photography together…

I think many photographers (probably mainly hobbyists but for sure also some professionals), at some point in time have questioned themselves about what are they creating after all: “Is this fine art photography or is this digital art?”

With the popularization of digital cameras, and especially with the affordability of the dSLR format, the effort that goes from the planning of the shot until pressing the shutter is only half the path. Post-processing in powerful graphic software applications like Photoshop becomes the second half as the RAW format files that most (if not all) the new dSLRs produce allow for an incredible amount of corrections/changes to the shot, thus granting a wider margin for error on the shooting and inviting for a greater creative expression on the processing (more about the RAW format in a future post).

Some years ago, when you looked at an image, you could almost always distinguish between what was photography and what was an image created with a computer (rare exceptions were images from some very talented people on either side of the border). Nowadays, it’s getting increasingly difficult to make this separation. A new fantastic form of photography is/has been arising and threatens to merge, or at least fuzz the borders between fine art photography and digital art.

But does the border still even exist? When you push your “saturation” bar a bit too much, or mix channels (or any other digital effect) in a way that turns the photo more unnatural, are you still in the realms of photography or are you entering the digital art world? To some extent, and from what I’ve been hearing, if a photo is too much modified, then loses some of its creative value. I don’t agree. Photography as art is done to elicit emotions. If the artist’s objective is better achieved with digital modifications, then let it be so. On the other hand, if you are trying to capture reality as it is, maybe you shouldn’t push it too much on the processing.

Look at the two images above. Can you say for sure which one is a photo and which one was digitally created from scratch? Well, from the tone this article is taking I bet you could guess… The photo is the one on the right (with saturation and tonal levels dramatically changed I’m sure); the left image was created with Adobe Illustrator. But if you had not read this far it could be hard to distinguish without a closer inspection.

When you plan a photo, having already in mind some digital changes that you intend to do even before taking the shot, are you creating fine art photography or using photography to create digital art?

But what is fine art photography after all? According to the Wikipedia, fine art photography is defined as “pictures that are created to fulfill the creative vision of an individual” thus integrating any digital arrangement you might include in your work. I’ll stand with this definition. Simply putting it, digital processing exponentially increased the creativity levels you can now achieve and express with photography, but it is still photography.

And what are your thoughts? Are you creating fine art photography or digital art?