Sticks in Brooklyn
New Journal 25 – The fight for exposure
What a strange e-morning! This beautifully sunny morn, on the terrace of our friend’s apartment, we are enjoying the flavours of a freshly brewed coffee and relaxing in front of our laptops with the New York skyline as our backdrop – the view is truly amazing.
Yet, in my cyber-world there seems to be a number of mini-arguments and conflicts raging. This is playing out mainly in the brutal world of the photographer – a world so wild, no person will venture onto it without the equipment necessary to do some serious shooting.
Most of these conflicts have arisen from people unhappy about the fact that some images/people gain a lot of exposure despite their work being decidedly below-par.
A separate war is raging between those who spam the hell out of facebook pages with their own images and those who own the spammed pages.
In normal wars exposure is a bad thing. If you’re exposed you may get a bullet up the arse…or worse. In photography wars, exposure is the holy grail. The degree to which photographers will go to get exposure is roughly equivalent to the degree to which soldiers will go to in order to not be exposed.
I have a new facebook ‘friend’. Let’s call him Jedward. Every single day, without fail, and throughout the day, I get a little update on my ticker (the thing to the right) which shows that Jedward has posted to a photography page on facebook. Each day it’s a new page and each day it’s the same message: ‘Hi, new fan here, blah blah blah’. Literally hundreds of pages must have this message now. For what? Clearly he wants to be noticed and is playing the numbers game.
On 500px, a site I’m slowly growing to love and hate at the same time, my comments box gets inundated with messages saying ‘Hey, faved your photo, check out my stuff too’.
They’re all searching for photography fame. I wonder what the ratio of time is split between them spamming and actually improving their photography skills.
The fact is, I don’t blame these people. Who wouldn’t want a huge following while doing a job you love? What stops me from doing what they do is that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In this age of faceless interaction our names or brands are as important as ever. I would never want to lower my integrity in order to get more likes.
Obviously I share my images to multiple sites and forums. I do this to increase my exposure. However, like most of us, I do it respectfully and in moderation. I said this a few weeks ago: If your images are good you will get noticed – I truly believe that.
There are some people out there who, in my opinion, aren’t producing great imagery but have a big following. Others moan about how these people get such a huge fan base. Personally, I don’t care much. As long as it doesn’t affect me I wish them all the success in the world. And of course, they may have found a genuine fan base who like their style of photography.
I suppose the question I want to ask myself is how many more followers would I have if I were willing to spam the hell out of the world? Clearly I’d have more than I do now. Would my reputation be slightly weaker? Yup, I believe it would be. Would I be happier? I genuinely believe I wouldn’t be.
Here’s the big one for me – would I have developed in the same way? The answer is most certainly no. You see, when you surround yourself by people saying how great your work is, even when it isn’t, improvement slows drastically. After all, why fix something that isn’t broken?
But when your following grows more organically, you push yourself to improve. With almost every improvement you see a rise in the numbers of people following you. You start to see that it is the quality of your photos that is the best measure for how big your fan base is, not the number of walls you spam. That’s my idealistic theory and I’m sticking to it.
We’ll see how that pans out.
The Cool Bits – Technical Info
Processing Time: 1 hour 30 mins
Processing method: Photoshop Luminance Masks & Photomatix
No. of Exposures: 3
EV Range: -2 0 +
Aperture: f/5
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 13mm
Lens: Sigma 10-20mm
Camera: Canon 60d
Plugins: Nik Color Efex for detail extraction, shift in lighting & color correction
Luminance Masks: Used to blend exposures
Photomatix Settings: Default> Strength 85 > Saturation 36 >Luminosity 1 > Lighting Adjustments 4.2 > Gamma 80
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Today’s Photo – NYC Sticks
This is an example of how to combine Photomatix with Luminance mask blending.
Photomatix, although a great HDR program, falls to bits during night city shots sometimes. It flares up monumental noise even at an iso of 100 and halos can become extreme.
I decided to blend the exposures using Luminance Masks with the intention of using this natural image for the background (building & sky). In Photoshop I layered the two images, replaced the sky of the Photomatix shot and then used a 50% brush on the sticks and water to get some of the softer Photomatix feel with it being too soft.
The foreground is entirely from the Photomatix image because I loved the slightly surreal texture it gave.
Before the Joys of Post-Processing
Learn to create this image in The Art of Cityscape Photography
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This entry was posted on Monday, June 17th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
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Another great one Jimmy! I really like how you got the soft reflections in the water. Really well done!
Thanks for the great comment Don. That’s why I used 50% of the photomatix output in the water, to keep it kind of soft.
Love it, and the addition of the moon also 🙂
Thanks a million Chris. I’m glad you like the moon addition. I think it’s hit and miss for some images.
you’re forcing me to buy your tutorial with these suberb images you keep posting Jimmy, hope my limted PS skills can follow it ……
Hehe, thanks. Judging by your images that won’t be an issue. That HDR One spot is still open for you 🙂
20mins download time 🙂
Beautiful image Jimmy.
Could not agree more with your sentiments in this article. So many people out there are trying to emulate others. Best option is to go out there and shoot your own style and then let your work speak.
Respect.
Right on Andy!
Great picture/work, It stoped me on my tracks and your “before and after” was a great lure. Great argument, and well writen thoughts so don´t worry, its really difficult to be a good photographer and writer, and you can do both really well. The pen and the glass are a great team. Congrats!
Leopoldo Garcia Berrizbeitia
Photonaturalist
Venezuela
Thanks a lot for the great compliments, Leopoldo. I love writing almost as much as I love photography 🙂
Well said and done 🙂
Thanks Marcelo!
Nicely said! I must say that in the early days of my own growth I did some of those things “Hi – I’m new here check out my stuff” but I soon started to notice two things.
1.) I was spending more time promoting my photography than actually taking photos which really wasn’t nearly as much fun.
2.) The people who did check out my stuff rarely stuck around or were what I refer to as ‘ghost likes’ the ones that just pad the numbers but don’t actually like, share or comment on a photograph you’ve taken.
Anyway – there is one part of your post that I do think needs clarification and that is where you go about saying ” If your images are good you will get noticed – I truly believe that.” I think you’re absolutely right about this, but you do have to put in the leg work to get the initial push of a loyal following. People aren’t just going to find you because you take good photos, there’s simply too much noise out there – so self promotion in moderation is certainly necessary – but there’s a fine line between posting the same desperate message on pages every day and simply sharing your photos to various groups forums and communities for them to enjoy and in turn hopefully want to find out more about you.
That was awesome. Well done, well done!
Would start with a big “thank you” for the article and your thoughts on how the emerging photography is lowering down the quality of work. Each day I get a notification of xyz photography page and I do watch their work as well. This is just a hit bumping thing that is more risen up these days, these shutterbugs are asking for likes regardless of the improvement in their work. They should improve their quality of work and appreciation will automatically arrive.
Thank You Jimmy.
Keep up the good work.
I am new to the semi-serious side of photography and I don’t post that often or really do much to promote my stuff since some of it is questionable quality at best but i’m always looking for constructive and honest critique. Jimmy, your post production photo stuff is very inspirational. I am a long ways off from really digging into PS and lightroom the way you do but I hope to get there some day.
I do not ever really see constructive comments from G+, they either love or they hate it but never go into specifics. I see people get offended when I offer my own perspective on how they might do something different or why I don’t like a certain image. I do not bash people when I do.
Criticism is hard to accept, even when its honest and constructive. Nobody is immune or ever reaches a point where they know everything and have no room left to grow.
Very, very true. From personal experience on FB and a couple of other sites I’ve learned that ‘likes’ really don’t mean anything – they’re as common as someone waving at you after you wave at them while you are driving down the street. Unfortunately, the holy grail of likedness has wasted an incredible amount of my time when I should have been improving my skills. I’m getting out of that run starting Christmas. Hope the work improves and the ‘likedness’ follows – if not, I’m waving at the wrong people………:)
I agree with you totally Jimmy & it is great that someone like yourself who needs as much good publicity as you can get, after all it is your living, has spoken out. However, I think that things are not going to change very fast until viewers refuse to make any comment or likes on these crap photos. This way crap photographers will soon get the hint – hopefully. The other thing that needs to change is those businesses (& there many crap ones of those) that charge new professional photographers an absolute fortune to advise them that they should put themselves out there in anyway that they possibly can, no matter the standard of their work.