48 Days Later
Those who know me might know that I've spent the last few months pulling myself out from a few social platforms that I've used extensively in the past.
I felt that these things had become too pervasive to the extent that sometimes I felt they had actually begun to control the way I thought and behaved.
Zombie army
Facebook was probably the most insidious for me but I have so much complex stuff to write about why I quit using Facebook that will not fit into the time I have available right now.
I'll talk about the zombie army instead and tell you why I quit flickr for 500px.
I take my photography pretty seriously as people who've kindly been reading this weblog over the years will know.
This is probably because of, rather than despite the fact that I've hardly made a penny out of it in my whole life. When a pursuit becomes a job, you have to be damned sure that you have what it takes to follow it through as the grind of it can make you wonder why you ever had a passion for whatever it is in the first place.
Flickr has, over the years since I joined in 2004, offered me a way to reach an audience for my photography, but recently, I'd become more and more disillusioned with it and wanted somewhere fresh where I could share my shots.
Part of it is probably contempt of the familiar - I feel I've been on flickr so long that it no longer feels fresh and exciting. There are various reasons for this,
Cumulative fatigue.
I've got so many photos on my flickr stream, and there are so many that I feel are mediocre, repetitive or otherwise superfluous in some way that I just felt the only way I could move on was to abandon it. I did try a couple of times to edit my stream, but it was a tedious and futile seeming task.Development inertia.
Flickr was one of the great innovators in the "Web 2.0" (such a quaint sounding term now) ecosystem when I joined just over eight years ago, but soon afterwards they were acquired by Yahoo! and it started to go wrong. Pointless social features began to be added, stuff outside the core offering like video sharing that diluted the brand, and the user experience failed to progress, to the extent that it all feels dull and clunky now. I could go on but this article expresses it really well. The net result was that it never really felt like it progressed as a photo sharing site.The zombie army.
I always felt on flickr that I was being observed by a faceless mass of image collectors, admirers and worse. I also made some great contacts via flickr and even some great friends, but overall, for each one of these there were dozens of blank face icons with empty photostreams adding me to their collection and after that it begins to feel grubby. I think part of this is because flickr is now so huge that there are massive communities of interest that exist within the larger community. One is the transgendered picture sharing community with all its pitfalls. Once you fall into that community it's hard to scramble out because of the gravity well that sucks you in.
I like to claim that me and my friend Erika Baarova were the first trannies on flickr. I think that is actually true. Back then, it was kind of easier to get your work appraised on its genuine merits. Now it's like dropping a pebble into a vast pool of tepid water. I had to get out.
500px
500px reminds me more of what flickr used to be like. A community of people interested in sharing and talking about photographs.
I decided to give it a go after opening an account and lurking for a few days and spent some weeks posting what I felt were the highlights of my past photographic work, as well as going around and looking at others' work and making comments.
This time, I'm being ultra selective and trying really hard to post only what I consider to be my best work. As before the landscape, still life and urban work outnumbers my self portraits. On 500px, the former work tends to get more positive appraisal and praise than the latter. This is a huge thing for me as my audience on flickr would tend to ignore that type of work.
There are also some photographers on 500px who genuinely give criticism in a constructive way rather than just giving praise, and I find that very very rewarding. I try to do the same.
It's not without its flaws - there is a reputation system that is based around votes (positive and negative) which is designed to ensure that new photographs of the highest quality populate the front pages every day. This popularity system appears to be too easily gamed and leads to people trolling for votes as well as apparently cartel voting down photos that seem to be too successful in their opinions.
Those faults aside, 500px is very pleasant to use. The way it displays images is very minimal but not dull. Because it eschews overt social features in favour of allowing you to display and look at photos (not art, not video), there is a simplicity to the experience that has attracted people who are seemingly genuinely keen on photography.
It's a pretty young site and it could yet suffer the same ills that flickr did, but my feeling is that it's unlikely because 500px is too niche. Flickr and Facebook are already the behemoths that occupy the prime positions in the photo sharing ecosystem. Pinterest, Tumblr and (of course) Facebook have steamrollered the "general" image sharing area, while you can't really see past YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook (yet again) for video sharing.
500px is simply good at sharing photos with other people interested in photos. I like that and I feel at home.
Since my initial few weeks, I've started taking new photos and I feel that due to my exposure to the 500px community, my photography has got materially better. All the images on this post have been taken in the last few weeks.
Elsewhere
So I hope you'll enjoy my efforts on 500px. You can even purchase images and I'd be very grateful for the financial support, though like I said before, I don't seek to profit from my work.
I share images in a couple of other places. My instagram profile (browsable here via the ink361 web service) is where I share most of my mobile images. My Tumblr blog is an edit of everything, including non photographic work and photos that I like but don't make the cut for my 500px profile.
comments powered by Disqus
Askance Glance, part 1
I originally presented parts 1-4 of this five part comic strip in a previous version of my site.
In a sad and George Lucas-like effort of folly, this new presentation of part 1 has been digitally renovated, with corrections to artwork, new lettering and some changes to dialogue.
More will follow as I clean it up, though I can't pretend that I will ever manage to finish the incomplete final part...
Askance Glance part 1
comments powered by Disqus
Deathline pull out from tonight's show
Hello!
Regrettably Deathline have had to pull out of tonight's City Showcase gig at the Borderline due to illness. Sorry to all who were going to come.
Needless to say you should still go to see the other 3 great bands. More live news soon.
comments powered by Disqus
| « | October 2012 | » | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Su | Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | ||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |||
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | ||
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | ||
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | ||
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||||
I'm a Musician, writer, photographer, designer, transgendered z-list celebrity. Insomniac's boyfriend. Tragic glamour and sleepless nights are my fellow travellers. Skinny jeans and pointy shoes are my mode-us operandi. I like cats. Especially the ones who talk. Oh, and David Lynch.
