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Posts Tagged ‘“Communities”’

Photography Communities — Where to Share Your Photos (Plus, we’re hiring!)

11 Apr

Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2, 3

We’ve all got them. That perfect shot hidden away on our hard drive or waiting in a negative sleeve.

But, with 80 bajillion photo sharing sites out there the question of where to share our masterpieces is not always an easy answer.

Getting your photos in the right place means getting your photos seen, so Photojojo has come up with a foolproof guide to help you figure out:

A) What type of photographer you are?
B) Where you should share your stuff?

Sound simple? It is!

You can finally give ImageHive the heave ho and find the sharing service that’s right for you.

A Personalized Guide to Photo Sharing

p.s. Now’s a great time to order photo prints! You can get up to 80% off with the Photojojo promo code at Nation’s Photo Lab.

p.p.s. We’re looking for the World’s Most Friendly Full Stack Web Developer in San Francisco, CA (relocation available) to join Photojojo (a.k.a. “Team Awesome”) Tell your friends! ? Here’s the details… ?

The Globetrotting Travel Snapper

beforeWhat They’re About: Hopping from hotel to hostel in search of graffiti filled alleyways and temples shrouded in fog.

Where They Share:
Flickr: The Flickr Travel Photography Group boasts over 75,000 members and the improved mobile app makes it easy to share while on safari.

Instagram: This photo-sharing app incorporates a neat map showing all your geotagged photos and makes it easy to share your travels across all your favorite social media sites at once.

Postagram: This app revolutionized the postcard. Simply take a pic on your phone, write a message, and hit send. The Italian postal system could learn a thing or two from these guys.

Their Cameras:Waterproof compacts, mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras, dinged up DSLRs

Famous Travel Photogs: Steve McCurry, Robert Frank, Trey Ratcliff

The Fashionista Portrait Popper

beforeWhat They’re About:The Portrait Popper assures that the fashions of their generation don’t go undocumented.

Where They Share:
Pinterest: A place to share and keep track of your best fashion photos. A digital dream board that serves fashion-fans as a well of inspiration.

Pose: Similar in design to Pinterest but much more fashion centered. Pose offers some fantastic features like the ability to tag items of clothing when you post!

Lookbook: The fashion-inclined share not only their best daily ensembles, but their best shots, too.

Their Cameras: Holgas, Polaroids, 85mm lenses

Famous Portrait Photogs: Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Klein

The Light Bending Experimenter

beforeWhat They’re About: Photographic mavericks that set the shutter to their own tune and have no fright of the night.

Where They Share:
Flickr: Has a number of experimental groups such as: Experimentation, Experimental Techniques, Light Painting, Digital Abstract, and Illusions

DeviantArt: While not a solely photography based site DeviantArt showcases some fantastic abstract and digital art that overlaps with photography.

Reddit: Subreddits cover all manner of niche photography including: /r/toycameras, /r/PerfectTiming, /r/lightpainting, and the tantalizingly titled yet completely safe for work /r/exposureporn/

Their Cameras: Anything that will take a photo! From paper pinhole cameras, to giant walk-in camera rigs, to glitchy phone cameras and Rebels

Famous Experimental Photogs: Andy Warhol, Troy Paiva, Kyle Thompson

The Foodie Chronicler

beforeWhat They’re About: Each day brings a new opportunity to fill their bellies and Instagram feeds with the best of both worlds.

Where They Share:
Instagram: To the foodie photog Instagram is like brushing your teeth, something you do everyday at least 2-3 times.

Foodspotting: This foodcentric photo app makes it easy to tag food types and find other users’ yummy stuff.

Serious Eats: The Photograzing section of Serious Eats offers up some of the finest food photography on the net.

Their Cameras: Their phone, DSLR or anything that will shoot macro

Famous Foodie Photogs: Carl Warner, Marcus Nilsson

The Family Memory Machine

beforeWhat They’re About: Pictorially protecting holidays, graduations, and family vacations from the inevitable fade of memory.

Where They Share:
Facebook: The popularity of Facebook, it’s simple design, and the ability to simply tag family members makes Facebook the social network of choice when it comes to family photo sharing.

Shutterfly: This popular print making service makes it easy to create photo books, stationery, and calendars from your own shots. It even has an app so you can use photos from your iPhone!

Their Cameras: Point-and-shoots, DSLRs, iPads, and zooming cameras for capturing various sporting events

Famous Family Photogs: Sally Mann, Jock Sturges, and Dorothea Lange

The Landscape Lover

beforeWhat They’re About: The Landscape Lover can’t get enough of the outdoors and they have the camouflage tripod to prove it.

Where They Share:
Google+: Nature photography based communities, built in photo editing, and extra large image uploads.

500px: Contributions from amazing landscape photographers from all around the world help to make 500px the gold standard of social photo sites. If you are interested in selling prints, this may be a good place to start.

Their Cameras: Million mega pixel DSLRs, medium format film holdouts

Famous Landscape Photogs: Ansel Adams, Charles O’Rear, Galen Rowell

The Analogue Enthusiast

beforeWhat They’re About:35mm, medium format or Polaroid, these retro revivalists love affair with analogue borders on religious.

Where They Share:
Tumblr: Powerful blogging resource and treasure trove of analogue projects. Search ‘film photography’ tag for some fine examples, and check out I Still Shoot Film and Filmspiration.

Flickr: There are tons of film photography groups on Flickr including this aptly titled group: I Shoot Film, which has a pool of over 2 million film shots. Whew, thats over 50 miles of film!

Meetup: This website is great for finding passionate people with similar interests and has loads of groups that are tailored towards film fanatics. (Ahem, photo walks!)

Their Cameras: Nikon F3s, Bronica S2s, Canon A-1s

Famous Film Photogs: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, William Eggleston, Robert Doisneau, pretty much any photographer before 1999

The DIY Photo Crafter

beforeWhat They’re About: While most people are content with a photo’s standard two dimensions, Photo Crafters like to see it in all three.

Where They Share:
Pinterest: The DIY and Crafts section of Pinterest is a mecca for those seeking crafty inspiration and looking to share their latest creations.

Instructables: This is where the mad scientists and fearless explorers of the photo world come to hand out their crafty camera hacks.

Their Cameras: DSLRs sporting a Holga lens, home modified IR cameras, their phone with a fisheye lens attached

Famous DIY Photogs: Justin Quinnell, Maurizio Galimberti, Enrico Nagel

The Micro Macro Marvel

beforeWhat They’re About: This specialized breed of shutter bug goes mad for all things small miniscule.

Where They Share:
Flickr: Boasting a number of fantastic macro groups such as Flower Closeups, Closer and Closer, Macro in Black and White, Macro Liquid, and Secret Forrest.

Small World: For thirty six years, Nikon’s Small World competition has been showing the world that the microscope can be just as effective as a paint brush for showcasing life’s natural beauty.

Their Cameras: Even your phone takes pretty sweet macro shots these days, but pros and enthusiasts shoot DSLRs with specialized lens so they feel special

Famous Macro Photogs: Thomas Shahan, Lester Lefkowitz, Michael Keniston

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Photojojo

 
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Best Practices for Communities on Google+

21 Dec

Community Coffee

I love communities. There are great big giant communities that are social networks themselves, but then there are smaller and more intimate communities where over time you really do get to know people better. These have always been the communities that I end up liking best. Places where you can go and eventually some really cool people end up setting up part of their daily internet experience there. I used to use Flickr groups for these sorts of communities, now I use Google+ (for a lot of specific reasons).

Google+ communities are new though and so I thought I’d take a few minutes to point out some best practices for how to engage, grow and participate in communities.

1. If you are starting a new community yourself, there are several important things to think about. How you manage and grow your community will have a lot to do with the success. For starters, you must be committed to moderating the community. This means showing up, doing a lot of the grunt work (removing spam, managing members, etc.).

I think it’s important to be as friendly as you can and to welcome new members personally even when you have time.

It’s also important that you grow the community. If it is a public community, try and get the word out. Promote your community on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and your other social networks. Be sure to use the invite feature on Google+ to invite your friends — you may have to break down some of your larger circles into less than about 190 blocks of individuals if you want to invite a circle. Did you know that you can “share” your community to your current G+ stream? Consider putting a link to your G+ community on your G+ profile page. Don’t over invite someone to your community though. If you invite them once and they decline that’s probably enough. If you keep inviting them you will feel spammy.

Think about why you are starting a community. Should you even start one? What is unique about yours? Does it make sense to start a new general community for photograpy, or is there some unique area of photography you want to explore (portraits, urbex, long exposure, a specific geographic area, etc.)

2. Communities are best started with a closer group of friends. Find some of your friends who share your passion for whatever your community is about and make them mods. Make sure that they are on board with helping to manage, grow and promote the community as well.

3. Be nice. The worst communities are full of negative people. Try to avoid these types as much as possible — not just on Google+ but in life in general. :)

As a leader of a community especially it’s your job to try and set the tone. I’m all for free speech, but I’d recommend against allowing bullying and harassment in your community. If you see it call it out gently. If someone is a real problem or trolling consider banning them.

4. As a participant in a community be thoughtful when you join a community. Are there rules? Try to figure out what these rules are. Try to engage with others on their posts first before starting lots of your own. Nobody likes spam. Don’t just show up to a community to post your photos and leave, or to promote some other community and leave, or worst of all dump commercial spam or links to stupid websites. Make sure you are posting the right thing in the right area. Some communities don’t want you to post dumb mind numbing photos in the discussion threads. Maybe there is a specific place for you to dump your photos. Find out where that is first.

5. The best communities are about discussions. Participate in these discussions. Find good ones that you like and get to know people through participation. +mention people specifically by name in community discussions. Unfortunately Google+ communities don’t bump threads yet :( and so this may be the only way that someone knows you are engaging them in a conversation in a community of fast moving threads.

6. Consider adding the most active members of your community to a specific circle. This helps you look at their stuff outside of the community as well. Circle sharing is also a great way to help promote your community. For the main community that I’m involved in, Light Box, I’ve created a circle for everyone who gets a photo voted into our Light Box. I shared it when it hit 100 members, 200 members and will share it next when it hits 500 members, 1,000 members, etc.

7. Pro Tip (thanks Ricardo Lagos): When you start a community make a separate private community just for your mods. Here you can hash out issues that come up with the community. You can discuss problems together privately and discuss policy issues. While you certainly will want to get the larger community opinion on the guidelines or direction of your community, having a smaller place for those most invested to figure things out is good too.

8. Add different sections to your community. Create an FAQ.

9. Try out different communities, but don’t try out too many. I think it’s a good practice to check out a bunch of communities to see where you like hanging out. Different communities will have different flavors. If you spread yourself too thin though it will be harder to get to know people there. Take some time finding a few communities that you really like and then once you settle in invest more time with those communities. Remember the key to enjoying a great community is individual participation.

10. Remember not to neglect your other participation on G+. It’s easy to get sucked into a community and end up spending all of your time there. As much as communities can become really nice little watering holes where you become better friends with some members over time, remember that the world is big and that one of the things that still is nice about G+ is that there is a whole big network out there without community walls. Some people will not want to join communities. Some people don’t have TIME to join communities. Make sure to take some time keep up with these folks as well. :)


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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Google+ adds topic-focused Communities feature

08 Dec

Googleplus.png

Google has added Communities, the ability to create topic-focused groups, to its Google+ social network. The Communities option makes it easier for people with common interests to discuss and share photos around themes. Connect has highlighted a couple of photography-related groups that have already started to attract members.

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google+ Launches “Communities” — Will Compete Directly With Flickr Groups for Photographers

07 Dec

This morning Google+ launched communities. It will be rolling out to users over the course of today. I don’t have it yet this morning but my Pal Trey Ratcliff does and has written a blog post about it here.

Over the past year, the photographic community has come together on Google+ probably more than any other site on the internet. Many of the most active of these social photographers early on migrated over from Flickr to Google. While there have been some great conversations that have gone on in many Google+ posts by individuals, what Google has lacked is a town square sort of feature where individuals could congregate around a shared idea. Today’s launch of communities addresses that and it also offers photographers a direct competing platform for Flickr groups for the first time.

I haven’t tried communities yet, so I don’t know how robust it is compared to Flickr groups, but one thing Google seems to do really well is quickly innovate and improve new features on G+ after they launch them. I’ll write a follow up post once I get a chance to try them out. I’m sure I’ll be joining Trey’s new community and probably creating one of my own. Stay tuned. :)


Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

 
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