Recently, with the help of Naomi, I combed through all of my photos to pick the very best to put in an online folio. Some of the digging went pretty deep, and I had to upload a few of my older photos to Flickr. So here’s a real potpourri of some of my older photos, with the descriptions I used on Flickr. I hope you enjoy!

Flickr has changed the way I share photos online, and has made building my blog and the community around it that much easier. But there are some things about Flickr, and the people that use it, that really get on my nerves. I want to get these off my chest, but don’t be to offended if I pick on your way of doing things, it’s not personal :)

Poetry in photo descriptions

If I like your photo, I want to know more about it. I don’t want to read death metal lyrics or emo goth poetry. It’s pretentious, it’s lazy, and it’s unfortunately become cliche. Please do us a favour and tell us your thoughts about your photo. They’ll be more personal and more relevant.

One or two word comments

On the flip side, a little more thought about comments on others’ photos would really be appreciated as well. Frankly, I don’t care if you think my photo’s “Awesome!”, I care even less if you think it’s a “Cool photo”. I’ve put a lot of work into it, I’d genuinely like to know what you think of it and why. If you’re going to comment, why not take the extra 30 seconds, engage your brain, and say something insightful.

Space separated tags

As far as I know, the standard way of delineating keywords (what your parents called “tags”) in all metadata is with commas. So why did Flickr have to use spaces, and quotes around tag strings? Now whenever I want to transfer keywords from one app to another, I have to strip out the commas and add quotes. And I’ve lost count how many times I’ve had to re-enter Flickr tags when I forget not to use commas.

HDR done right. CC kennymatic

Overdone HDR

Yes, it’s amazing what you can do with processing software these days. Yes, it’s cool to see detail in the sky and in the shade. Yes, HDR has a place in artistic photography. But for goodness sake, please stop with the over-saturated, flat, dirty, haloed, massively compressed dynamic range novelty photos you can’t seem to get enough of. Very rarely is the HDR “effect” a successful artistic statement in itself. Good HDR is usually invisible. Subtlety is your friend.

Disrespectful comments on artistic nudes

The human body is the most beautiful thing in this world, and a truly skillful photographer can capture that in a photo. It takes talent, technical mastery and an understanding of beauty to make an artistic nude photo. It also takes courage, patience and great communication for a model to make it work, in partnership with the photographer. So please! Show some damn respect! No one wants to know what you want to do to the model. And what on Earth do you think sharing your lustful thoughts will get you anyway? It’s not like the model’s going to call you because you demeaned and degraded her with your filthy fantasies. For goodness sake, grow up!

Gaudy large banners and “awards”

How wonderful, fifteen users loved my photo so much they awarded it the “Most Awesometastic Flickr Masterpiece Photo Award”, complete with a giant sparkling, shiny, flashing banner. And yet they didn’t say anything about the photo? Really, I don’t give a damn about your invented ‘awards’, and I really hate the comments on my photo getting clogged up with huge icons that look like they were stolen from a circa 1998 web site. Martin Gommel, a friend and much respected photographer says it best: “Please do not add any badges, banners or awards. I know that finding the right words isn’t easy, just try it, I believe in you ;)”

Comments that are only group invites

I have a little more patience with group invites on my photos, IF they are: relevant, subtle and accompanied by a personal, considered comment on the photo. But if you want to spam your group by copy/pasting an ad, especially one with a banner, without adding anything thoughtful to the comments, then you can be sure I’ll ignore the invite, and probably avoid your group in the future. The same goes if you pollute the comments on others’ photos. You’re only advertising your group as something I want to avoid.

Vignette done right. CC !!!! scogle

Vignette

Almost as bad as overdone HDR, this cliche post-processing trick is a fad that needs to die. I hope you realise that vignette was originally a defect in cameras, and we can be grateful we don’t have to suffer it willingly now. Like HDR, it can be done well. Skillfully applied, vignette can evoke a certain mood, closeness, or age, and can direct the eye into the composition. Unfortunately it’s rarely done skillfully. I swear some people run ALL their photos through a Photoshop vignette action before uploading. By the way, if your photos have vignette because you’re experimenting with older cameras that generate their own vignette – Awesome! You rock :)

Culling? What’s that?

Just because you can take hundreds of photos of the same thing, doesn’t mean you have to share it with the world. That gorgeous photo of a bowl of strawberries, doesn’t look so gorgeous after the tenth nearly identical photo. I take as many photos as anyone, maybe more, but the idea behind that is to cull all but the very best. It’s one of the secrets to looking like a good photographer. If you upload them all, you’re letting the secret out, and everyone will know you just got lucky with one of the shots. That is, if they’re not bored to tears and leave before they get to that one great shot in twenty.

No reply notification on comments or discussion

This is without a doubt, my biggest Flickr peeve. The thing that makes Flickr so attractive, and so successful, is the incredible community that has built up around it. Flickr have done a lot of great things to encourage the free exchange of ideas and images, like groups, maps, discussion boards, photo pools etc. But when it comes to communicating between users, they’ve really dropped the ball.

When I make a comment on someones photo, sometimes I’ll ask a question, or I’d like to see what others have to say. But what if I forget to check it later? Well tough luck, I’ll never know. This is a problem with one photo, but I comment on hundreds! There’s no way I’ll ever be able to follow up on all the comments I’ve made. Yes, I’m aware of the “Comments you’ve made” feature, but it’s clunky at best. This problem is even worse in group discussions. With no reply notification, no one knows when a thread has been updated, and very quickly, a discussion group can end up looking like a ghost town.

Flickr builds communities. CC mikebaird

There’s a critical mass for a community (for example a Flickr group) to be successful. That critical mass can be achieved a LOT sooner if the community members are able to easily and quickly respond to new discussion amongst members. Forum software developers know this, and subscriptions and notifications are essential included features even on the most basic software packages. There’s even a comment notification plugin for wordpress.

Flickr would do well to encourage the development of communities by enabling reply notification. If they did, you would surely see a rapid snowball effect as people spend more time replying to comments and discussions, which in turn would bring more people online to reply to those, and while they’re there, reply to others that they have yet to participate in. This positive feedback loop would result in a rapid growth of traffic, and a greater “pull” for new people to sign up, so they can participate. Surely Flickr wants more members and more active members?

From a purely selfish perspective, I want to know when people reply to my comments, and as the admin of the group Learning Photography with Neil Creek, I want to reach critical mass sooner rather than later.

Come on Flickr, pull your finger out.

It’s not all bad of course. You can read my post about the “10 things I love about Flickr (and its users)“.

I’ve been wanting to experiment with cross-lighting a subject with flash and the sun, ever since I read about it on Strobist. The effect can be very cool, but I knew I’d need some practice.

Leif was over again this weekend, and we were practicing photography together again, so he (only slightly reluctantly) agreed to pose for me again so that I could try it out. These were shot on a handy baseball pitch, which could be a useful location in the future.

I was using two bare flashes, a Canon 580EX and a Vivitar 285HV. Most of the time they were both set to full power, to match the sun, and were on stands 2-4 meters away from Leif.