Choices

I had recently been spending some time offering advice to fellow photographers. Both solicited and otherwise.

This quickly earned me two things, positive and negative feedback, with no room in the middle.

I tried my best to keep my comments helpful in the overall development of a frame, assuming that others would want to benefit what a discerning eye may have to offer. What I forgot to realize, was that many, many people do not want this – and it was vain of me to think so.

The epiphany came to me when I read this very good post at Lighting Essentials. The piece here that really struck home for me was this “It is rude, amateurish and quite honestly rather stupid. If you have not been asked, then you probably don’t know what the photographer was trying to do…” so true, and I feel kind of shitty for anyone I may (and know) I pissed off.

While my intentions were good, I definitely jumped into something a lot bigger than myself. Though, I will say this, users of sites like Flickr seem all too content to let meaningless “rewards” and comments like “awesome” pile up, but the minute someone says ANYTHING that offers a critical view of the image – that feedback is deleted. I’m of the all or none mind – I either let all comments come in, good and bad, or I turn off comments. But there’s a hierarchy at play there – and I spent some time upsetting it this week…

Posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 11:11 pm. Filed under: Portraits Tags: Legs, Rockalily RSS 2.0 feed.