Scott Murray
Senior Member
2011 winner
Photography less about skill
- Thread starter UmarPk
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2011 winner
Scott Murray
Senior Member
Peoples Choice...
RockyNH_RIP
Senior Member
Question??
When you said "My statements don't need "backing up" because the evidence is all there, everyone can see for themselves what wins big photo awards, well I guess most people except you.
Do you consider Flickr popularity contest a big photo award?? I for one do not, but that is just our difference of opinion.
and... You continue to post direct attacks on people... why can you not refrain???
everyone can see for themselves what wins big photo awards, well I guess most people except you.
That again was uncalled for .. If you dislike the people here that much maybe you should try another forum where people are mindless and will just agree with you. You do not appear to want to actually have a discussion without some sort of derogative comments with anyone whom does not say what you wish... I made an earlier polite comment on this subject and (at least as I type this) you did not respond. If you are just trolling to create conflict, then maybe its time the Moderators look at you and your contributions here..
pat in NH
When you said "My statements don't need "backing up" because the evidence is all there, everyone can see for themselves what wins big photo awards, well I guess most people except you.
Do you consider Flickr popularity contest a big photo award?? I for one do not, but that is just our difference of opinion.
and... You continue to post direct attacks on people... why can you not refrain???
everyone can see for themselves what wins big photo awards, well I guess most people except you.
That again was uncalled for .. If you dislike the people here that much maybe you should try another forum where people are mindless and will just agree with you. You do not appear to want to actually have a discussion without some sort of derogative comments with anyone whom does not say what you wish... I made an earlier polite comment on this subject and (at least as I type this) you did not respond. If you are just trolling to create conflict, then maybe its time the Moderators look at you and your contributions here..
pat in NH
Scott Murray
Senior Member
UmarPK, all the photos I have showed you have won or been recognised not for exotic places but because they are amazing photos. Anyone can have Flickr comments, but not everyone can do what they do....
Sure at least true photography is alive somewhere, but whole point is these days it's really less about skill for most purposes.
Don Kuykendall_RIP
RIP :(
There are people in this forum that are earning a living with photography today and are truly outstanding photographers. I earned a living in photography for over 20 years and TV and webhosting and design for over 15. My technical skills far exceed yours. As I have stated in this forum on several occasions I shoot for fun and for my enjoyment. You are insulting many of the people here by saying skill doesn't matter and it is more a matter of luck at where they are. This is probably a matter of your age or possibly where you are from I don't know but you need to grow up.
Scott Murray
Senior Member
I guess you missed my article I pointed out, here it is again.
[h=1]How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet[/h]http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17mp98bddgpjnjpg/original.jpgWeb startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.
This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.
Do you remember Flickr's tag line? It reads "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement.
Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr.
Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.
Even the notion of Flickr as an archive—as the place where you store all your photos as a backup—is becoming increasingly quaint as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple, and a host of others scramble to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops.
The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.
It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn't share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.
Here's how it all went bad.
[h=3]In the Beginning[/h]Flickr famously began as a feature of another product. Husband-and-wife development team Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake had created a photo sharing feature for another product they were working on, Game Neverending. Butterfield and Fake were old-school Web types. The kind with low Metafilter user numbers and WELL accounts.
And because they knew the Web so fluently, they soon realized that their real product wasn't the game: It was this secondary feature, the ability to share photos online. This was 2003, and photo sharing was still very much a novel problem for people. Flickr was born.
It was a hit. Bloggers especially loved it, as it solved an age-old photo hosting problem. (This was during the hoary old days of the Web when storage actually cost money.)
Two years later, in 2005, Butterfield and Fake sold their company to Yahoo, whose deep pockets promised great things for Flickr's users. It upped the monthly storage limit to 100MB for free users, and removed it altogether for pro accounts, for example. Yahoo had bandwidth and engineering to burn. Things were going to be great; things are always going to be great the first time you embrace a new corporate mother.
[h=3]When Startups Become Successes[/h]Very few people manage to build successful startups. But when the one hits, it can change the status quo in an instant. Suddenly, those two elemental ingredients—people and code—become very valuable to the established companies that seem to reside on an untouchable corporate Mount Olympus. It would have to be an overwhelming compliment and sense of validation. How would you handle it? What if you made something beautiful and useful that changed the status quo? Would you sell it? Would you sell yourself?
That's the choice successful startup founders are faced with. Build something good, and the buyout offers start rolling in. But while selling out in most other fields of creative endeavor is frowned upon, it's a given on the Web.
Maybe it shouldn't be. For every YouTube, there are horror stories of great people with great products, squandered in the yawning maws of uncaring corporate integration. Dodgeball gets lost in Mountain View. Beloved bookmarking services like Delicious become fields of information left fallow.
Some upstarts take an independent path. Consider Foursquare. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Each spurned buyout offers, and none has ever been stronger. All managed to find a business model over time. Or even StumbleUpon, which only found its feet after its founder re-purchased his company from eBay and spun it off again as an indie.
It's no secret that for many entrepreneurs, the exit is always the goal. It's about the sellout before the first line of code is written. But for a select group, products are meant to be art. They are meant to literally change the world. And for those, selling out can be especially problematic.
Flickr falls into that camp.
[h=3]Integration Is The Enemy of Innovation[/h]"Yahoo was a good fit initially," says Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, who left the company in 2008. "We had offers from various companies, including Google, and I honestly think that Yahoo was a great steward. It was a great steward of the brand. It was allowed to flourish. In the subsequent two years after the acquisition, Flickr blossomed."
Yet even early on, there were signs that the transplant—which had seemed so successful at first—was going to fail. That the DNA didn't match. This was largely due to how this new appendage was grafted on by Yahoo's CorpDev department.
Well, that's something you shouldn't have to worry about.
You're just angry and jealous of people who take really good photographs and receive due recognition.
You think your photographs are "just as good", but you don't get any recognition. So, in your mind, the game is fixed.
Since you don't have the opportunity to go to exotic places, you're being cheated by others that do.
Well, Bucky, lots of folks don't get to go to exotic places, and lots of people still take good photos, and those people still get recognized for their efforts. (Excluding you of course, but that's because your efforts are sub-par.) If you continue to practice, you'll probably get better. And who knows, you may even take a good photograph.
But in the meantime, quit blaming everybody and everything else, for your inabilities. It's not about opportunity. It's about ability.
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Well you know, talk is cheap and actions speak a whole lot louder than words. If you want to be able to pontificate and chest thump about your amazing abilities as a photographer who can take a Pullitzer Prize winning photograph of a used roll of toilet paper, then I propose you upload some examples of your own photographs. Until you do you will just be a "talking" photographer and not a "walking" photographer, and they are a dime a dozen. Feel free to check out the almost 40 images in my gallery. I am not one to brag, I prefer to let humility rule the day so I just let my images speak for themselves.
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You don't need many technical skills in photography, you just need to learn how to use the camera properly and effectively. Although I never boasted my technical skills--I'm a new photographer. We would hope you with your decades of experience would have technical skills to change ISO, time intervals. exposure, shutter speed, lens, and how to press the snap button.
Post reported, inflammatory disrespectful post with racist undertones.
Rexer John
Senior Member
While your posts on this thread have been respectful?
I've been critical but rarely am I disrespectful and the one time I apologized on the forum, but never have I made a post with racist undertones about where someone is from. Though glad to know you are defending the racist.
Yes, I have an example, take a look at this photo, the photo receives high awards and recognition on Flickr; mostly because of what the photo was taken of, a rare Red Panda. Not necessarily due to the photographic qualities of the photo. It just doesn't matter if the photographic skill is there; all that matters is it's a rare Red Panda as the subject. That's what matters and pleases the eye for most people. They could careless about the composition, exposure, lighting, emotions captured, or other factors great photographers can capture with skill and experience.
Kleine rode panda by ~~Nelly~~, on Flickr
Can someone really tell me had this been a photo of a house Cat, would it have received the same attention as it did this being a rare Red Panda? That too probably in captivity.
Then again perhaps the subject itself is more important than a photographic skill and the aforementioned elements and factors, it really is the subject that defines the photo.
If I were using this image to showcase my abilities as a photographer, I would be mightily embarrassed. The bear is in the dead center of the frame, with tons of wasted negative space on both sides. It is also taken from a viewpoint looking down on the subject. This looks like something my daughters take with their cell phone when they were in their early teens. Now compare and contrast this image I took of a common housefly. No auto exposure, not autofocus and multiple manual flash in a light tent using a reversed 50mm lens on a bellows. If you want to be able to compete with the big boys instead of talking nothing but trash, you better get a much better game. And get some humility too, becase no one likes a jerk.
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Using the Race Card? When all logic is lost and you have no valid argument, use the Race Card. Your protest is frivolous and has absolutely no merit. There was no mention of race in any post, except yours. Again, you've taken a point and turned it in to a ludicrous argument. You are now beginning to sound ridiculous.
If I were using this image to showcase my abilities as a photographer, I would be mightily embarrassed. The bear is in the dead center of the frame, with tons of wasted negative space on both sides. It is also taken from a viewpoint looking down on the subject. This looks like something my daughters take with their cell phone when they were in their early teens. Now compare and contrast this image I took of a common housefly. No auto exposure, not autofocus and multiple manual flash in a light tent using a reversed 50mm lens on a bellows. If you want to be able to compete with the big boys instead of talking nothing but trash, you better get a much better game. And get some humility too, becase no one likes a jerk.
THAT is a quality photo of interest and good mechanics. Very nice work!
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