I like to think that I’m an early riser. However, given difference between Alaska and the places where many of you live, it’s all relative. By the time I’m sitting down at my desk banging on my keyboard, or shooting sunrise photos in the mountains somewhere, chances are you’ve already been working for a few hours.
Anyway, in my continuing quest to inspire, educate, distract, humor and entertain, I’ve decided to focus on three great photography related blog posts that I stumbled across this morning in my bleary eyed pre-breakfast web surfing session. Enjoy.
1. Online critiquing is all a joke by Olivier du Tre
How many of you including Heather have had one of your Flickr photos ripped to shreds by someone you’ve never met? Happens all the time? Where’s the love in that? Healthy debate and constructive critique are one thing, but blatant criticism of someone’s personal imagery is just uncalled for.
Obviously Olivier doesn’t think too much of this either. He shares excellent insight in his rant, and posts a few great links. My favorite ones are the two at the bottom of the page called great-photographers-on-the-internet; basically imaginary negative critiques of famous historical photographs. Check it out.
2. The Eiffel Tower Lightening Photo on the BBC News Website
Lightening photos are always cool, in fact this is only one of a few really good dramatic ones that I’ve seen already this morning. I’ve never been able to capture a good one; they’re pretty hard to get. It’s all about timing and being in the right place at the right moment. Apparently Bertrand Kulik was when this amazing strike happened. It’s a great illustration of the fact that sometimes great photos are 90% just being there.
3. Are You the Future of Photography or The Problem With It? by Chase Jarvis
Crowdsourcing is quickly become a fact of life in this day and age and photography is certainly not immune to this reality. With Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and 537 million photography blogs, it would seem that photographers are taking over the world.
While some lament that so much imagery is undoing the very fabric of creative photography, I would argue that all of this shooting and sharing only drives creativity skyward. In his post, Chase outlines why he thinks the future of photography is “pretty damn interesting.” I concur.
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As always, thanks for reading. Now go out and be creative today!
I have also been enjoying Olivier’s discussions on online critique. I have never been eviscerated on flickr personally, but I have certainly seen it occur. My worst “critique” came from one loudmouth photographer in a crowd at Mount Rainier who did not approve of my shooting with a Canon, using a tripod among other things. The other photographers turned on him for me but I think it is a symptom of the same problem regardless of it showing in person or on the internet. This all says a lot more about the person making the comments than the original photograph or photographer in question.
Well said, Michael. I’ve never had anything ripped apart on Flickr either, but I’ve certainly seen it happen to people that I know. It’s uncalled for.
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