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Right place, right time. It suggests that the photo in question is the result of luck. You were lucky to be there at that time and in that location. The only reason you got this particular shot is because the stars aligned in a magical mystical way and, dumb fuck that you are, you managed to push your fat finger down on that big old shutter release button and the clever camera did all the hard work. Right place, right time is never said with a smile, it is said (at best) with a smirk and (at worst) with a jeer.
So let’s break it down, shall we? Right place. Ermmm, no – it’s precisely the place I decided to stand. Nobody told me to stand here and take a photograph, nobody forced me, I was not lead here by the divine preachings of Saint Gerald of Zucchini, the force is not strong in my family, I didn’t foresee it in a dream. No, I made a conscious decision to stand in exactly that spot.
But why that location? Well funnily enough, over the years we photographers learn a few things. Amongst the things we learn is good places to stand prior to taking a photograph. We study maps and guide books, we pore over Wikipedia, we get inspired by films and TV shows. We make a point of studying our surroundings and we make a point of scrutinising landscapes. We look at places and think to ourselves – you know what, I’m going to stand there and I’m going to take a photograph.
Many of the places that we photographers choose to stand, immediately prior to taking a photograph, are difficult to get to. Sometimes we’ll walk for an entire day just to get to one spot. We get on aeroplanes and fly to the other side of the planet to stand in a particular spot, just prior to taking a photograph. We walk, run, swim, wade through rivers, get thigh deep in snow-drifts, climb rock faces, dive to the bottom of the ocean. We evade angry wildlife, dodge idiots in vehicles, risk illness, dismemberment and death. All so we can stand in a very particular spot.
Right time. It’s almost like the camera takes photos itself, with no input required from a chubby-fingered human and it is, they suggest, pure luck that you happened to be there at that precise moment. Ermmm, no – it’s precisely the time I decided to be there. I was not handed a schedule listing, down to the minute, when I should be in a particular location. I did not get a text advising me of my movements from a central photographers operating agency.
But why that time? Well funnily enough, over the years I’ve learnt when it’s likely that certain things will happen. Some events, such as the sun rising and then setting again, have been going on for a while and it’s usually only laziness that stops anyone from photographing such daily events. But we photographers set our alarms early and we get in our cars and drive or we walk or we fly and we do it all in the expectation of being in a particular place at a very particular time.
We learn the movements of the stars. We come to understand the shifts and ebbs and flows of the oceans. We learn about glaciers, volcanoes, avalanches, tornados and eclipses. We have to know about these things because that is how you successfully photograph them. There is no easy way of doing this – you have to devote research time to it. You don’t get it right first time either – it takes a shit-load of practice.
So the next time someone looks at a photograph you took and smiles that thin smile and says, “right place, right time, eh?” feel free to hammer them in the genitals with an axe handle. As they sit groaning on the floor, clutching their private parts, smile thinly at them and say, “right place, right time, eh!”
Urbex – short for urban-exploration, this increasingly popular style of photography requires practitioners to illegally trespass on someone’s (usually heavily vandalised) property so that they can photograph themselves wearing a WW2 era gas mask and a trench coat. The reasons for this are not readily apparent.
Tripod – walking stick with an uncomfortable bracket in place of a handle. Also serves as a cattle-prod, mugger-deterrent and depth-gauge for rivers. Sometimes used as a mount for cameras.
Photo Walk – highly ritualised meeting in which normally solitary photographers congregate in large numbers at popular tourist spots at the behest of YouTube celebrities. The purpose of the walk is to completely obscure the picturesque location from any tourists that happen to have flown in from thousands of miles away, by means of a human wall of nomadic photographers wearing Lowepro backpacks and shit-eating grins.
Wildlife Photography – the process of photographing a lion in such as way that he looks like he’s an alpha male, resplendent on the African savannah and not a depressed infertile old moggy sat on an ochre-coloured chicken-wire and concrete ‘rock’ in a middle-England city zoo that’s better known for its vegetarian lunches than its exotic creatures.
Capture – an alternative way of referring to a photograph. Seen as a pretentious expression by some people, but beloved of writers who’ve used the words shot, exposure or image too many times in the same article.
Leading Line – a fence.
Leading Lines – two fences.
Food Photography – mashed potato pretending to be ice cream.
Keeper – that one shot in 250 which you’re not embarrassed to upload to your Facebook page.
Long Exposure – the first shot of the day when, having forgotten to check the settings beforehand, the photographer realises too late that the camera’s still set to last night’s 30 second manual exposure. The resulting shot is often far more interesting than what they were actually intending to photograph and is consequently shared with the caption, “Thought I’d try something different today.”
Photojournalist – career path with similar prospects to that of installer of asbestos ceilings.
Negative – the kind of comment you should expect when uploading your photo to certain photo sharing sites, such as 1X and pretty much any web-based photographic discussion forum.
Natural Light Photographer – someone who’s never successfully worked out how to operate a flash. Also someone genetically predisposed to not be overweight.
RAW – means never having to worry about your camera’s white balance again.
Rule of Thirds – grid-based compositional guide designed so as to remove all possible appeal from a scene by placing the main object of interest in one of only four blindingly obvious locations within the frame. Have an Irish friend say it out loud for an all-together different rule.
Constructive Criticism – bitter and usually unwanted commentary on your photograph by socially inept cretins who haven’t taken a decent photo themselves in 30 years of trying. The only thing you need to know about constructive criticism is that’s always the latter, very rarely the former.
Underwater Photographer – the goal of all underwater photographers is to take a shot where the water comes half way up the lens while below a perfectly in-focus sea turtle swims by and above the sun sets on a swimsuit model relaxing on the deck of a stunning yacht. In reality the memory card gets filled with shots of bubbles, blurred shots of rocks, shots of empty water (varying shades) and one shot of the sky taken when a bit of seaweed touched their leg and they panicked because they thought a creature from the deep was attacking them.
Blown Highlights – solid white area of a photograph caused almost exclusively because you were trying to ‘expose to the right’.
Compact Flash Card – small piece of silicon wafer embedded in plastic which warps in and out of existence on the temporal timeline, according to how desperate you are to find it.
Macro – international law states that there are only three permissible subjects of macro photography – drops of water, small house spiders and flower petals.
Dutch Tilt – photographing a subject (usually a person) at a jaunty angle, usually due to the failure of a tripod leg, but sometimes intentionally.
Metadata – where to find the name of the cracking group who hacked that bent copy of Lightroom you’re using.
Golden Hour – period of the day during which landscape photographers further alienate themselves from their loved ones by disappearing at precisely the same time as the evening meal is being served.
Auto-Focus – incredibly clever system that, by means of passive phase detection implemented through a beam splitter and micro-lenses, enables you to crisply photograph a tree instead of the racing car you were actually hoping to capture (see above).
Northern Lights – rite of passage in which a budding photographer, approaching adult-hood, goes out into the wild with only a military grade tent, satellite phone and a 40lb backpack crammed full of the latest advancements in powdered meals, in search of Arctic disco lights and a career as a photo-tour guide.
Fine Art Photography – long exposure shots of ocean piers or railway platforms in black and white. Nearly always practiced by photographers seeking to distance themselves from ‘ordinary’ photographers by the simple process of shooting mind-bogglingly dull subjects.
High Key – basically lone trees on snowy hillsides. Often attributed to shots after the fact because the photographer accidentally over-exposed an image and thinks the resulting shot looks ‘arty’.
Mono – black and white effect employed by photographers in an effort to save an otherwise seriously flawed image.
Foreground interest – bits of wood, branches, seaweed, shells and other readily available detritus that a photographer can drag from its actual resting place to a convenient spot just in front of what they’re actually photographing. Most commonly employed by coastal photographers who will cheerfully drag a six foot branch for half a kilometre if it makes their sunset composition look a bit less dull.
Glass – hipster-ish way of referring to lenses.
HDR – an image produced by combining multiple exposures in the hope of visualising a bad acid trip endured during a visit to a brutalist east German shopping centre. HDR’s reputation in the photographic community is only marginally bettter than Gary Glitter’s in the music industry. Note: 99.999% of photos labelled HDR are in fact tone-mapped images, but the label has kind of stuck now.
Boudoir – slightly over-weight ladies wearing bra and knickers, posing awkwardly on brass bedsteads. Requires soft lighting, heavy vignetting and massive post-processing to eliminate all traces of humanity from the subject. The end results are usually about as erotic as a colonoscopy.
Light-Painting – usually nothing more elaborate than a 30 second exposure of some bloke spinning some burning steel wool on the end of a piece of twine in front of a quarry or a bit of woodland. The end results looks like a long exposure shot of some bloke spinning some burning steel wool on the end of a piece of twine in front of a quarry or a bit of woodland.
Surf Photography – photos taken from inside a breaking wave. The shot in question (taken on a GoPro by someone in 2foot surf with a lot of time on their hands) is usually the only flukey keeper out of 500 exposures. The only exception to this rule is Clark Little who twats himself about in monster shore-breaks in Hawaii and deserves every bit of credit for popularising this now over-subscribed photo style.
Street photography – homeless people and street vendors photographed without their knowledge by people with Leicas and beards.
Straight out of the camera – just enough processing so that it doesn’t immediately look like it’s an HDR (see above).
Night-sky Photography – the Milky Way.
Storm Chasing – photographs of adverse weather such as electrical storms and funny looking clouds. Seems to attract the most serious-minded individuals in what is already a fairly serious-minded past-time. Storm chasers use the term ‘core punch’ without the slightest trace of levity to describe the act of driving through the middle of a thunderstorm taking photographs as you go. I know, right?
Travel Photography – holiday snaps taken on a DSLR rather than an iPhone.
Film – edgy dudes shoot on old-fashioned cellulose in the mistaken belief that it makes their photographs somehow more worthwhile than the average iPhone snap.
Kit lens – disparaging way of referring to the lenses that are bundled with DSLRs. Owners of said lenses are made to feel that they are inferior ‘glass’ (see above) that should be drop-kicked into a rubbish bin at the first opportunity.
Drone Photography – cool way of flying $1500 into a lake.
Bokeh – Japanese for ‘blurry blobs’.
Trophy Shot – this is photograph taken in a location that’s been shot thousands of times. Most photographers think they can do a better job than the other guy and so the caption for said trophy shot inevitably begins, “I know it’s been shot a thousand times, but …”
Semi-Pro – once sold a canvas print to a friend of their mum.
Pro – stay-at-home mum who bought an entry-level DSLR to stave off the boredom and keep the PND at bay and now charges $300 to photograph pregnant ladies and family pets using only kit lenses (see above).
Landscape Photographer – semi-autistic person who likes spending long periods on their own and didn’t fancy taking up fishing.
Secret Spot – geographic location jealously guarded by a photographer because they are obviously the only person worthy of recording its majesty. Said location is often revealed on social media by a local who comments, “Isn’t that Little Squiggly Dell down the end of Browns Lane?”, followed shortly after by a, “Yes, well spotted!” said through teeth so gritted they might just crack.
Instagram – place where photographers upload pictures of food taken on a DSLR while pretending they were shot on an iPhone.
If, like me, you enjoy photographing the sunrise and sunset, then you’ll know that there is nothing worse than looking at a colourful sky out of the car window. Sure you could set the alarm clock to go off a bit later and time your arrival at your chosen location for 15 minutes before, but there will be many occasions when you’ll be cursing yourself for it. The bottom line is that the sky is often at its best during ‘first light’ – that moment when the angle of the sun’s rays to the horizon is such that the high clouds are picked out in all their glory. As the sun rises towards the horizon the light gets whiter and, of course, brighter, but not always more colourful. The same goes for sunset – get there at least an hour early! Which reminds me …
This one still catches me out. You can be standing there half an hour after sunset thinking that the sky is all played out and so you collapse the tripod, stow the camera in your bag and head back to the car. Then as you’re driving down the road on your way home the sky suddenly comes to life as the fast receding sun picks out the high clouds. It’s gutting. So unless there’s nothing but a solid wall of dark cloud between you and our solar system’s star, wait it out.
I’m about as far removed from a camera gear obsessive as it’s possible to get, but I always make sure I’ve got an alternative lens or two packed in the bag. My ‘go to’ lens is the Canon 10-22mm EF-S which I use for 90% of my shots, but if I’m not getting any keepers then I’ll often switch to my zoom and see what the scene looks like up close. So while you’ll read plenty of advice about the right kind of lenses to use for landscape photography, that doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t mix it up. Quite often we become fixated with finding ‘the shot’ with the lens that happens to be on the camera at the time when switching out to something else could open up amazing new vistas. See also: lens-lock, constantly switching lenses in search of a winning combination.
After you’ve hunted around looking for a spot with a view you like and you’ve set up your tripod and lined up the shot and stuck an ND-Grad on the front and triple-checked you’re at hyper-focal distance – it’s very easy to remain in that spot for the duration. You’ll get a good shot in your spot, but you’ll also end up with a card full of photos of the exact same composition. So mix it up a bit, move around, test out other spots – assuming you’re not at Mrs Macquaries Chair in Sydney (where there’s ever barely elbow room between photographers), you can always go back to your original spot if you don’t find anything better.
You get up early, drive for hours, walk to an exotic location, set up your camera and then realise you’ve left your memory cards at home. It happens to photographers all the time, but generally speaking it’s such a lousy experience that it only has to happen once . I’ve been in this situation and it’s for this reason I always have a spare card in my wallet. I’ve never had to use it, but that’s probably because I know the spare is there and it serves as a subconscious reminder. See also: batteries, making sure they’re charged.
Unless you’re so wealthy that the cost of replacing a DSLR and lens is chump-change to you, then you need to quickly assess the dangers in any given situation. Yes we should push the limits in search of a shot, but let’s be honest about it, this is landscape photography we’re talking about, not war reportage. You won’t miss out on a Pulitzer if you decide to retreat in the face of a big wave or away from a crumbling ledge. There’s always another angle and it’s often better. Personally I’d rather look after my gear than go without it for a few months while the insurance claim’s sorted. Don’t be timid, but also, don’t be suicidal.
We’re all influenced by iconic photographs taken in famous locations and it’s perfectly cool to go to those same locations and to try and ‘put your own twist on it’. There are, after all, famous photographers based in cities who photograph the same locations week in and week out and they are always well received. However try not to rely on these locations as they lead to a kind of lazy photography where you get stuck in a bit of a rut. Look for new and interesting locations and one day you may produce a photo of a location that has everyone else playing catch up.
ishermen always have a story about ‘the one that got away’ and photographers inevitably do too – that one time where you had the shot of the year lined up and for one reason or another, it just didn’t work. The light’s wrong, it’s a bit blurry, the composition’s out – there are many reasons why things sometimes fail to come together. Then later as you look at the photograph in Lightroom you have a lightbulb moment and flick the image into black and white. It’s always very transparent when a photographer’s done this, because it’s probably the only black and white image they’ll share during the whole year. So by all means shoot for black and white, but don’t use it as a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card for sub-standard shots. Chalk it up to experience and move on. See also: that one nice bit – cropping heavily in post.
When I first started out, I used to get terribly worked up about the images produced by other photographers that were receiving lots of attention. I’d nitpick and find ‘flaws’ in the images and tell myself that I could take an equally good shots if I had that camera/that lens or was at that location or had that much spare time on my hands. Fortunately I woke up to myself pretty quickly and started enjoying other photographers work – let me tell you, it’s much nicer to be collegiate than adversarial. So someone took a great shot – be pleased for them – then go out and take an equally good one yourself.
If you start getting wound up by the weather, then you’re never going to do well as a landscape photographer because this style of photography has as much to do with the missed opportunities as the awesome moments. I’ve had periods where the horizon’s been clouded over for two weeks straight – that’s two weeks of 5am starts and hardly a photo to show for any of it. I’ve had countless evenings, sunk up to my hips in river mud down at the mangroves, getting feasted on by sandflies and mossies with no decent shot at the end of it. I’ve watched endless sunset skies fail to fire. I’ve missed innumerable flocks of birds flying elegantly through the setting sun’s rays. All of the above only serves to make those moments when you do get the shot, all the sweeter. So suck it up, learn to cope with disappointing shoots and every time you get a bad one tell yourself that you’ve just bought and paid for another great one.
Facebook and Instagram are the main outlets for our newly discovered photographic obsession but they are merely the front-runners in a mind-bogglingly crowded photo-sharing marketplace. 500px, Pixoto, EyeEm, Viewbug, 1X, Flickr, VSCO, Google+, Panoramio, DeviantArt, ImageShack, Imgur, Behance, Photobucket, Shutterfly, SmugMug, Nat Geo Yourshot, TwitPic … it goes on and on and on. Billions and billions of photographs and all but a minuscule percentage of them forgotten about seconds after they get posted and likely never viewed twice.
For a serious photographer (professional or otherwise) it is increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. However if you do manage to share a photo that goes viral, you will quickly discover that nobody gives a flying fuck who took it. Shortly after your image crosses the boundary between non-viral and viral, a small army of locust-like photo-sharers will vacuum up your image, reshare it with no attribution whatsoever, reap a vast number of reshares and otherwise beneficial in-bound traffic and then move on to the next victim.
By way of example, let’s have a look at Earth Porn’s Facebook page. With just under 5million page likes, this photo sharing page could potentially change a photographer’s life. By channelling a huge number of people in the direction of the sucker person that took the photo, they could get sales of their photograph, attract new customers, land paid gigs with magazines, ad agencies or general business clients and generally raise their profile. Instead they get precisely fuck all.
Consider the image above. The page owners at Earth Porn uploaded this image, completely unattributed and in the space of two hours it had accumulated 10,607 likes and (more importantly), 1,101 shares. The caption lists the location (though these are often wrong) and that’s it – no mention of the person that stood there and took the shot and who owns all the rights to this image (he goes by the name of Wolfgang Staudt incidentally). Complain all you want, the page owners don’t give a shit because even if you do pursue the matter through Facebook officially, by the time the matter’s resolved they’ll have ripped off a thousand other photographers in exactly the same way. To make matters even more laughable they include on their page this text, “This page claims no credit for any images posted on this site. All copyright goes to their respective owners.” As if that somehow excuses or makes legal, what they are doing. Think they’re an isolated example of poor behaviour? Think again.
This is a page with about 150,000 likes – nowhere near as big as Earth Porn, but exactly the same behaviour – an amazing photo, no attribution whatsoever (it’s by Stefan Hefele), a shitty caption and a large amount of onwards sharing which is of no benefit to the actual photographer at all.
There are thousands of these sorts of pages on Facebook alone and it is certainly not an isolated example. Over on Twitter the situation is every bit as bad. Our friends @Earth_Pics operate there too, with an account with over 2million followers. And guess what? Day in and day out they post copyrighted photographs with absolutely no attribution to the copyright-holding photographer whatsoever.
Again, there are thousands of photo-sharing accounts on Twitter and I’ve yet to encounter one that acknowledges the people that actually took the photos their shitty accounts thrive on.
The situation then, is terrible. If you’re a photographer or an aspiring photographer trying to make a name for yourself or to get better known, then there is nothing to be gained in being featured by any of the photo-locust sites. Since no identifying information is included in an image that might send some web traffic your way; no name, no website, no Twitter account, no Facebook page – someone would literally have to do a reverse image lookup on your photo to find you. In fact that is exactly what I had to do on the two images at the top of this page.
I would also like to make it clear that I am not talking about Facebook shares or Twitter retweets or their equivalent on other services. Those are of course completely fair game and to be encouraged since they point back to your account. I am talking about posts that originate on social media sites using copyrighted photographs and which have no attribution.
If you upload your images to any of the usual photo-sharing sites (Facebook, 500px, Instagram etc) and that image is half-decent, then you can fully expect a photo-locust account to pick it up and share it as if it was their own. Sure, you could include a prominent watermark in the image, but generally speaking prominent watermarks only make photos look terrible and besides, anyone with a copy of Photoshop and five minutes with the clone stamp can remove it. So don’t waste your time.
You could share it at a much reduced resolution/dpi too, but this will get you nowhere. Most images are viewed on mobile devices anyway and even the most compressed photos look okayish when viewed at postage stamp size on a smartphone. You could also choose to not share it at all, but this rules out any possibility of publicity via the Internet and seems like surrender to me.
The solution is to use the processes in place on these platforms to complain as and when your image is used. If enough people complain, then the accounts will get taken down and the user banned. In Twitter’s terms of use it states this, “We reserve the right to remove Content alleged to be infringing without prior notice, at our sole discretion, and without liability to you. In appropriate circumstances, Twitter will also terminate a user’s account if the user is determined to be a repeat infringer.” So stand up for your rights and if a photo-locust uses your image without your permission, report them.
Over on Facebook you can find all the information you need here and there’s a handy copyright infringement form which is located here. Instagram being a Facebook property these days, the exact same systems are in use there and you can find the Instagram specific form here. Google Plus’s takedown page is located here. You can find similar takedown pages on all social media sites and, speaking from my own experience, they systems they have put in place do work though the cogs sometimes take a little while to turn.
If you have concerns about proving you’re the copyright owner of an image, then you might like to protect your image invisibly using a digitally embedded watermark. You can find a free service called uMark here. There are also specialist protection/reverse lookup services like MyPicGuard, which will reveal who’s helped themselves to your images and enable you to issue DMCA takedowns against them. And don’t forget DigiMarc which has come bundled with Photoshop since the dawn of time.
There are some rare occasions of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts doing the right thing. Tourism bodies, which get by almost entirely by pimping photographs supplied by keen photographers (amateur, serious and pro included) tend to do the right thing. And if any of the admins of the locust accounts would like a template for doing it the right way, look no further than Australia.com’s Facebook page.
So photography has been my hobby and, in some ways, my job for some time now and I’m as keen on it now as I was when I was 10. I enjoy getting out and taking photographs whenever possible. I really don’t care what the weather’s doing, I’m happy to go out in all conditions, but I’m a sucker for bright colours and that of course means I love sunrises and sunsets. If I don’t go out for a few days, I get restless and can only last a few days before the urge to get outside with my trusty Canon gets the better of me.
As a result of all the above I take a lot of photographs and like most photographers, I like sharing those photographs. However as much as I love to share my photos online on photo sites and social networks, there’s one thing that I absolutely hate. So here, on my little old blog I would just like to declare the following:
Now I don’t want to come across as some smarmy arsehole who thinks he knows it all, because I really don’t know it all. Far from it in fact – there are huge areas of photography that are a total mystery to me – things like studio photography for instance – I haven’t got a clue. Ask me to photograph a model with strobes and I’ll probably pass out from the exertion of figuring it all out.
However none of the above matters for a single nano-second; if I put a photograph online then it’s because right then, at that moment, I’m happy with it. If other people like it too, then that’s brilliant. If nobody likes it, then that’s fine and dandy. Likes and dislikes I can deal with, because you can’t force someone to enjoy something, but ‘expert’ reviews I can do without. If I don’t put “CC welcome” at the bottom of my image (and hell is going to freeze over first) then please keep your unsolicited opinions to yourself.
The problem with photography is that every single part of it, from the tiniest of details to the broadest of topics, is utterly subjective and every single photographer there is, or ever has been, does things their own way. So when you look at a photo you frame it within your worldview and you form an opinion of that photo based on that worldview. All of that’s fine, what is not fine is suggesting that your worldview is any better than mine or that the techniques you’d employ when taking a similar shot are in some way preferable to the ones I used.
You wouldn’t have saturated the image that much? Awesome. I don’t care. You’d have removed the power-lines? Terrific. I don’t care. You would have exposed it for slightly longer? Magnificent. I don’t care. You might have a thousand reasons why you think my photo has been taken or processed incorrectly and I couldn’t give a shit about a single one of them. I am not interested in making my photos look like yours, I am interested in doing things my own way, however good or bad that may (subjectively) be.
I would also like to point out that I do not expect to have high praise endlessly lavished on my photos either. As I said, it’s entirely subjective and what floats my boat may have all the appeal of a poke in the eye to you. That’s cool! Imagine how shit this world would be if we all liked the same thing. If you don’t like my photo, move on, there are billions and billions more out there, all waiting for you. Enjoy.
So if you’re one of those photographers who think it’s okay to explain how a photo could have been taken ‘better’, just stop for a second and ask yourself if the photographer is going to care what you think. If you were at a concert, would you leap on stage in between songs and suggest a different rhythm to the drummer? If you were at a gallery opening would you remonstrate with the artist about the angle of their brush or the colour of the paint? Would you charge into the kitchen in the middle of a meal and ask the chef to justify their choice of herbs? I’m betting you wouldn’t. So stop doing it on photographs. Unless someone asks directly for it – keep your ‘constructive’ criticism to yourself and take a second to try and enjoy what the photographer has created.
The popularity of photography has led to a flood of imagery onto the internet and, slowly but surely, this in turn has made the vast majority of photographs utterly worthless. Even as little as five years ago you’d have been able to carve out a small business taking stock images but these days, unless you have a photo-factory and can churn out thousands of very high quality images a month, you’ll be lucky to make ten bucks in a year. Given Getty’s recent announcement that you can embed many of their images in your website or blog for nothing – you’ve got to wonder how much further down the toilet the stock photo industry can go. But I digress.
So there’s all these photographs floating about on the Internet and looking for a home and all these photographers desperately looking for an outlet for their images and recognition of their abilities. Most photographers, (particularly the ones who might be classed as ‘serious’) believe that their photos are superior to everyone else’s – it goes with the turf – how many photographers do you know with someone else’s work on their walls!? Hmmm? The problem for the photographer now is proving that their photos are good. All of which brings as around to the modern photo ‘competition’.
For almost as long as the art form of photography has existed, the photography competition has attempted to grade the output of photographers. Magazines such as National Geographic and Nature, organisations such as Pulitzer and the National Press association and companies such as Canon and Nikon have operated such photo competitions for many years. And while I think doing well in these competitions is often akin to getting ‘Best Smile’ in your junior school awards, I think we’d all agree that they can help challenge photographers and, occasionally, boost their careers. And besides, sometimes it’s nice to know that you’ve got a great smile.
The big problem is not prestigious events such as the National Geographic Photo Contest, but smaller competitions whose aim is not the promotion of fine photography but the acquisition by the organisers of cheap imagery. To be blunt, many of these small competitions are cons – not only do the organisers end up getting all the photos they want, often with terms and conditions that grant them royalty-free rights to use the photo in any way they wish for as long as they wish – but they get you to pay for the privilege! It’s breathtakingly awful.
The kind of competition I’m referring to is often run by a small or medium-sized business or a tourist organisation. Having found that decent photographs will cost them actual money they settle upon a great scheme – set up a photo contest, put up a couple of cash prizes (nothing too huge, just enough to tempt the unwary) and stick a promotional page up on Facebook. Proud photographers pay their $10, wait for the closing date and eagerly check the page to see if they’ve won. But the only winners in these competitions are the companies and organisations that operate them.
These competitions lure in photographers of all kinds, good and bad, with the promise of some publicity and maybe a prize. They do not look like a humongous rip-off because they are often run by otherwise decent law-abiding organisations. That’s the really insidious nature of these competitions, that an otherwise benign establishment such as a tourist authority, can act in such a duplicitous way.
Here’s an example of some small print for a competition run by a regional tourist organisation here in Australia. By entering this competition, entrants give the organisation permission to “… utilise their photographic images, including reproduction, copying and publishing, for specific purposes and initiatives. Entrants agree to allow [the organisers] to use their images in a variety of media forms including print media, council publications, internet sites, facebook, twitter and other forms of electronic communication, posters and event notifications.”
So if you enter this particular competition you’re basically giving the organisers the right to use your photo in any way they want, for as long as they want. And the kicker? There’s an entry fee! So not only do the organisers end up with all the photos they want, but they get the unwitting entrants to pay for the administration and, most likely, the prize pool as well. You’ve got to admit, it’s genius.
Now you might decide that there’s a certain cachet in winning a local photo competition, but once you see that photo in print advertising, brochures, Facebook covers, email signatures and posters for the next 20 years, you might wonder if you could actually have made some money from it instead. And remember it’s not just the ‘winners’ that grant an all-encompassing royalty-free licence in perpetuity to the organisers, but every single last entrant. It’s like setting up a market stall and paying people $10 to repeatedly punch you in the face.
L.Ron Hubbard, the nut-job that inflicted Scientology on the world once said, “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.” I’d like to bring his quote up-to-date and say that you don’t get rich taking photographs – if you want to get rich, you start a paid-for photo competition.
Many paid-for photo competitions are complete and utter rip-offs that benefit nobody except the organisers. The maths are pretty easy to work out – you set up a competition and have a winning prize of, say $5000 and an entry fee of $25 per image. That prize would get you a pretty nice full frame camera or a few new lenses and it’s easy to see how attractive that would be to the average gear-obsessed photographer for such a small investment of just $25.
So the organisers make a nice web page and a promotional Facebook page and they might even line up a couple of marginally famous judges. All they need to do is dupe 200 photographers into paying the $25 fee and they’ve made their money back – once they’ve given the judges their cut everything after that is pure undiluted profit.
There are plenty of paid-for competitions that exist only as competitions – they’re not attached to any organisation or magazine – their only purpose is to generate money as a business. In some cases entry is tied to paying for some ‘premium membership’ with entirely dubious benefits. Beyond the entry fee they make the other requirements as wide open as possible in order to attract as many photographers as possible – you can spot these rip-offs a mile away because they have about 10 different categories and two of these will always be ‘portraits’ and ‘travel’ because everyone’s got a photo in those categories. They are, at best, a lottery.
It’s a pretty lousy situation all things considered and it will carry on for as long as people fall for this ego-flattering nonsense. I strongly suggest that everyone takes a deep breath and has a long hard look at the benefits of entering any photo competition. Is it a simple copyright grab? Do you have to pay for entry? Who are the judges? Is it basically a lottery? What’s the prize pool? What are the terms and conditions? Will winning provide any concrete benefits to you as a photographer whatsoever?
I’m not saying that all photo competitions are evil. I entered the International Loupe Awards myself last year and won a bronze for the single image I submitted. I entered because a lot of the fellow photographers I follow on Facebook and who live locally did and it seemed like a good way of assessing where I was photographically. I also did a lot of reading about it before entering and it seemed legitimate. There are decent photo competitions out there, but there’s also good car dealerships too and we all know what sort of reputation they have.
So what do you think? Have you ever entered a photo competition only to be bombarded with ‘upgrades’ to your entry? Have you ever hit that ‘Submit’ button and realised too late that you’ve been taken for a ride? Or have you found the opposite, that photo competitions you enter are awesome and you won a D800? Hit me up in the comments …
Update July 2014: So the answer to the question posed above is ‘no’ – 1x.com is not the serious photographers last best hope. Feel free to read the original article (when I was full of hope!) and the comments posted by others who’ve used the site, but the general consensus is that while 1x.com might have better quality photography on it, it is a closed circle within which most photographers will never get a look in. The search goes on …
1x.com has been around for a few years now and has always been visibly different to DeviantArt, 500px, Flickr, Viewbug or any of other photo upload sites for one big reason – it is curated. What does that mean? Well simply it means that in order to make it into the site’s main gallery your work has to be approved by a peer group of photographers and it has to be high quality work. In fact they warn you before you even submit an image that less than 3% of all photos get selected. In other words, there is a bar that has been set and that bar is high and if you get a photo selected then it is a genuine achievement. I have yet to have a photo selected and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Recently 1x had a big redesign and a relaunch and the changes are excellent. Each member gets a profile page which they can upload images to and have control over. As a free member you get 10 uploads a week which should actually be more than enough because the idea is to showcase your best work, not all of your work. You can view anyone’s profile page and click around at random or you can view in a ‘lights off’ slideshow mode designed to bring out the best in an image.
If you see an image you like then you can add it to your favourites and if you’re particularly taken with a photographer, then you can follow them. There’s also a cool Playlists feature which enables you to curate your own selection of images and then share that selection with everyone else in the afore-mentioned cool slideshow mode.
In order to get your photo included in the main gallery it has to be viewed and approved by curators. As a free member you can submit one image for consideration per week, paying members can submit up to 10. Images are chosen based on idea, mood, technical quality and originality. You only have to spend a couple of minutes browsing through the main gallery to see that the system works – the quality of the images is incredibly high and because they have been chosen to be there, there’s no gaming the system like with 500px and Flickr.
One of the biggest problems with 500px is the utterly inane and completely useless comments you get – they make the average Ebay feedback look like high literature. This is not an issue on 1x thanks to its collegiate atmosphere but also because there is a specific critiques gallery where you are invited to submit your photos and have them analysed and commented on by other photographers. You never have to use these forums and you shouldn’t unless you’re prepared to accept some constructive criticism – I’ve never seen anyone be nasty – but you may receive some robust feedback. In other words if you would like to grow as a photographer, to improve and to take better photographs then there are plenty of people on the site who are happy to help you.
If you prefer to learn through the work of others, then the tutorials gallery is a great place to start. Here photographers post their work and explain exactly how they achieved the end result. There’s a huge variety of styles and themes and they’re all incredibly informative. If nothing else it can inspire you to go and try some new photo technique you’ve read about, often a great way of breaking out of any creative lull you find yourself in.
There are also regular competitions run on the site, based around a theme (such as ‘vivid’) with various prizes up for grabs for the winner, including full membership of the site. As with everything else on the site the quality of the submitted images is always very high and it can be a great way to push yourself to try something new.
I have to say I’ve been very impressed by pretty much all aspects of 1x. As I mentioned, I’ve yet to have an image selected for the main gallery and that’s great because it gives me something to aim for. I’m not content to just churn out the same photos week in and week out and I now have a target to aim for – a level of quality that I can try and match and maybe even surpass.
If you’re looking for a site that will show off your images to great effect, but which also has a solid community of like-minded photographers then you should definitely give 1x a look. About the only criticism I have of the site is one that I also levelled at 500px which is that prints can only be sold in two sizes (at least that’s one size more than 500px) and the prices are determined by 1x not the photographer. But it’s a small gripe and I don’t think any serious photographer would use this facility anyway since it makes far more sense to run your own full-blown online store with someone like Zenfolio. So please do check out 1x if you get a chance, particularly if like me, you’re a 500px refugee. You can find my 1x gallery here – drop by and say hello.
During the course of the debate, there was much pointing out of dictionary definitions by various people. Indeed if you look in pretty much any dictionary you’ll see this:
photographer: (noun) a person who takes photographs, especially one who practices photography professionally.
There were also further examples given, such as – anyone who drives is a driver and anyone who plays golf is a golfer. So sure, if we boil it down to simple etymological definitions – everyone is a photographer. But, dictionary definitions aside, I fundamentally disagree with the statement that anyone who takes photographs is a photographer – pro or otherwise. I’m not even sure that I qualify for the title of photographer.
Before I go on I would like to point out that I am not a photo snob. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t care what camera you use, who made it, what lens it has and how much it cost or if it’s a smartphone, a compact point-and-shoot or a high-end DSLR that cost the same as a small family car. Photographers can and do use all of the above. But! Not everyone who uses a smartphone, compact point-and-shoot or a high-end DSLR is a photographer.
The smartphone has made it possible for anyone anywhere to take a photograph of anything at all. Moreover the arrival of applications like Hipstamatic and Instagram encouraged a new kind of photo-taking in which nothing was too dull to capture. My opinion is that the overwhelming majority of users of Instagram are not in any way, shape or form, photographers – they are snappers. I don’t mean to denigrate anyone by calling them a snapper – I enjoy snapping too – I just strongly believe that there is a world of difference between your average Instagram-style shot and a proper photograph.
What’s the difference, you ask? I think it’s actually pretty simple – a snapper is someone who only really thinks about a photo after it has been taken.
Note: This article was first published in 2012 and as such, some of the information below may have changed, but user feedback would suggest otherwise. My feeling is that a number of awful photographers sitting atop the popular pages are gaming the system with bots – I wrote an article about this here.
So when 500px came along, all serious photography enthusiasts (whether pro or hobbyist) applauded. Finally here was a site that was designed by photographers, for photographers. Its cool interface and community driven voting system attracted the best and the brightest. The first page of the ‘Popular’ section of 500px displayed stunning photographs taken by the best snappers on the planet. I remember cheerfully signing up for a full membership of the site, days after seeing it for the first time, inspired by the first rate photography and motivated to try and produce equally awesome images. Fast forward a year and I let that membership lapse a couple of months ago and I wonder if I’m the only one. These are my main issues with the site:
500px like all upload sites is, of course, democratic – in the sense that anyone can upload their photos – and that is as it should be. However over the last year or so I’ve been seeing photos which could, at best, be charitably described as average, sitting pretty on the most popular page while high quality images of all types languish at the bottom of the list. Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but I don’t think any impartial audience would claim some of these images should be as high up the rankings as they are. So what’s going on? If you look at the comments on such photos it’s easy to work out why it’s happening – the same clique of people are upvoting each others images irrelevant of their quality. If you are a member of good standing of this clique then you could cheerfully photograph your backside and expect it to be front page by morning. 
The good news is that you can join the clique too – all you need to do is cast aside your integrity and press ‘V’ and ‘F’ on your keyboard, for every photo you see, no matter how good or bad. Then you simply let the photographer know what you’ve done by leaving a comment such as “lovely v+f” on it. What happens next is that the grateful photographer returns the favour and v+f’s your photo. Do it to enough photos and before you know it, you’re charging up the charts to the front page. I don’t want to sound like an elitist arsehole when I make these accusations, I just strongly believe that photos should be upvoted based on their individual merit, not because you’re returning a favour to someone. I also don’t think that hitting the Like and Favourite buttons on a photo that is clearly awful makes you a nice person – if you produce bad photos and everyone tells you they’re great then you’re going to continue taking bad photos. I have no interest whatsoever in having a high ‘Affection’ count, but for some people it seems to be the reason they get out of bed in the morning. Scott Kelby, the highly respected photographer and author warned that this situation would happen, over a year ago. In this blog post he said, ” … if they want to keep this from eventually turning into flickr 2.0 (and I saw a number of comments that fear exactly that), I think someone (or a group of editors) are going to have to be the “gatekeepers” to keep people from uploading snapshots and lowering the overall quality. I know this opens up a Pandora’s box of “Why did my photo get turned down?” and so on, but if someone doesn’t set a bar somewhere, we could wind up in flickrland before you know it.”
500px might claim that the counter-balance to the V+F brigade is the ‘Dislike’ button. This only appears on your account once you’ve uploaded a certain number of images and have gained enough ‘Affection’ points. If you click it then it will typically knock a photo back about four pages in the popularity rankings, so it would appear to have a far greater weighting than a V or an F.
Unfortunately the Dislike button seems to be deployed very often by people, not because they do actually dislike a photo, but because they want to increase the chances of their own image. If they’re sitting just short of the front page, they can strategically ‘Dislike’ a photo and watch their own take its place. Personally speaking I don’t mind the button’s existence, I just object to the way it has been used – call me old fashioned, but I use it myself when I genuinely dislike a photo. Dislike certainly isn’t a popular feature as the endless pages of support requests bear out. It is clearly being used from fake accounts in order to game the system and the loser in that regard is quality photography. 500px’s official view on the subject is here; in short they say that only 10% of users have access to dislike and that art is subjective anyway, so don’t get all pissy if you garner a few dislikes. Glad that’s been cleared up then.
Pulse is something that’s unique to 500px and it is supposed to represent the ebb and flow of a photo’s popularity over time. As a photo garners likes and favourites its pulse increases and then as that subsides, its pulse drops too. The idea behind it was to give photos a fighting chance in the popularity stakes, but as 500px themselves point out, “It is not necessarily a measure of photograph’s quality.” All photos record their highest pulse and this is seen as the image’s high water mark of popularity. Unfortunately your photo’s pulse can be badly affected simply by the fact that you’re not in a North American timezone. The algorithm uses a time decay variable which happens at the same time each night. According to 500px, “To get the most out of your photos [we] suggest uploading them in the morning, Eastern time.” That’s right – make the mistake of uploading during the daytime in Australia and your photo will not fare nearly as well as a photo uploaded during the daytime in America because it will be affected by the ‘time decay’ variable far sooner. Awesome.
This is my biggest issue with 500px and it’s one that they show no signs of addressing. As crappy as Flickr is, at least there is a modicum of community involvement thanks primarily to the Groups feature and their associated chat forums. There is nothing similar on 500px whatsoever. You occasionally get a bit of brief to-and-fro with another 500px user but this is inevitably because they are new and trying to garner favour with you. There are no meaningful photographic friendships on 500px, above and beyond I suppose, the afore-mentioned V+F clique. So instead of introducing community features in order to encourage worthwhile interaction between paying members of the site, 500px introduced useless facilities such as Stories (a half-arsed photo-blog tool) and Flow which shows you photos people you follow have Liked or commented on (who cares?). It all adds up to a depressingly soul-less experience where photographers prostitute themselves for the sake of meaningless ‘Affection’ points.
After an interminable delay 500px finally introduced photo sales earlier this year and they even managed to cock this up. Rather than give photographers some control over this, there are just two options – both of which are awful. 
Firstly someone can download a desktop version of a photo. This costs them $2.99 and 500px take a third of the purchase giving you $2 from the sale. Secondly someone can purchase a 24×36 canvas print of your photograph for $207.99. From this sale the photographer earns $63. There is no option to sell other sizes (despite claims to the contrary) and no option to change the price of the print. Also the prints are only available for purchase in Canada and the US. You’ve got to wonder why they even bothered.
As I mentioned, I signed up for 500px’s main subscription (about $50) shortly after signing up for the site. Apart from the word ‘Awesome’ appearing beneath my avatar there seemed to be very few other benefits. In fact at that time, the only real advantage to paying for membership was unlimited uploads. Besides, 500px was encouraging its users to only upload their best work, so unlimited uploads was somewhat meaningless – who takes more than 10 (the free account cap) excellent images a week? All unlimited uploads does is encourage people to use the site exactly the way they do with Flickr. The other features a subscription gets you are domain linking, unlimited number of sets (wow!), option to add custom logo and icon to portfolio, SEO optimisation (that’s a feature?), Google analytics, statistics page (the only way to find out which of your images has been ‘disliked’) and a few extra portfolio themes. I had buyers remorse about a day after signing up for the main 500px subscription package and when they sent me a reminder that my account was due for renewal, I immediately went to the site and cancelled it.
500px seem to have totally lost sight of why they started the site. They say, “Over the years, the 500px platform went through a number of revisions and changes, growing together with technology and photographers, and keeping focus on the highest quality photos.” That might have been the case, but it isn’t now, the focus has shifted from quality to popularity and quantity. In the last couple of years, since 500px went from a niche site to a high profile photo sharing phenomonem, other sites have come along which handle the quality/quantity issue with far more grace – in particular ‘competition’ sites like Pixoto and Viewbug and portfolio sites like Photoshelter. And let’s not forget, the long-awaited Flickr relaunch is due soon. So in all honesty, given the way 500px have handled things up till now, I don’t believe there is a way back for them. Which is a shame, because it showed so much promise.
