Posting photos online for critiques and comments can be a joy for some, a torment for others.
Another way of looking at it would be to say that it’s useful for many and an obsession for even more.
For me, at various stages through last year, it’s been all four of these things. It started as a joy, quickly became a torment, then as I started to understand things better it most likely flirted with obsession for a short period of time. Now however, it’s become a simple but regular part of my daily online activities and is genuinely useful. An improved insight into your own work and others – these are the rewards if you take the feedback from critique sites and put it into the right context.
The three sites which I regularly contribute to are:
This is a quick summary of all three, and what participating means to me.
Pbase
(my site on Pbase can be found here)
Pbase was not the first place I posted an image online to – that dubious honour went to photo.net. What is was though, was the first place I became a regular at and began investing in the community. Pbase has the following things going for it:
- Many good photographers. A few great ones.
- A great feature called “Favourite photographers” which is a link on your profile which allows you to keep tabs on the latest images of your favourite photographers
- Full resolution uploads (i.e. it doesn’t resize your photos – can display them at their natural resolution – in my case a preferred size of 800 x 533 pixels).
- A Comment summary which shows all the latest comments you receive
- Has great layout options such as allowing advanced HTML to make your galleries look great (or simple), and also has a nice tree structure allowing your gallery “Portraits” (for example) to contain another series of sub galleries (e.g. “Kids”, “Pets”, “Models”, etc). In my opinion it’s still the best community site to showcase a portfolio
- A simple to use UI (User Interface)
- A simple voting system
These things make it a great community site and that’s what I use it for primarily.
Comments / feedback on pbase tend to be encouraging but “gentle”. It’s pretty rare to get negatively critiqued and therefore is a great site for encouragement. But unless you go specifically asking for it, you aren’t going to get many in depth reviews about what you could do to improve your image. So this is a double edged sword of the encouragement but like many things, if you work at it – you can find a good balance of the two.
It also lacks some features which would make it much better. For one, a good mechanism for rating / rating pictures. You can be told your photo is “good”, but how good exactly is that? Is it a 10/10 good, an 8/10 or a 5/10 good? Introducing ratings (which some other sites do) is a great way of forcing both the reviewer and the reviewed to look at their work in a quantitative fashion. Now, Pbase does have a voting system which allows you to cumulate votes over time but it can be haphazard and you never know how many you receive. If you do get a lot however you can end up in the Popular galleries / photos section which is useful in helping discover talent. Having said that many correctly suspect that it can in some cases (but not all obviously) be as much a popularity contest as a photo contest. I’ve been fortunate to regularly end up on the front page of “Popular Galleries” for some of my work although I’ll let others be the judge of whether that place is deserved as a result of the community I am a part of, or the images that I create.
All in all tho, Pbase is a great site with a wonderful accepting community and it’s where I spend the majority of my time commenting / uploading to.
Photo.net
(my site on photo.net can be found here)
Photo.net is an interesting place. It’s generally considered to be site which has the highest number of quality images. One look through its Top Photos gives significant credibility to that claim as you’ll see quickly some of the most stunning photography you’ll care to lay eyes on. Photo.net has the following main features:
- It’s based on a rating system. When you submit a photo for review, community members can vote on your image with two criteria in mind – Aesthetics and Originality. Both are marked out of 7 with 5 /7 being good, 6 / 7 being very good and 7 / 7 being excellent
- It drives lots of traffic and a lot of people browse and rate. Unlike many sites (e.g. Pbase), when you submit an image for critique / comment, you do not need to be well known to get a dozen or so people rank and rate your image. If it gets a high average, it’ll appear in the Top Photos which will in turn mean more people get to see your image
- The critiques are far more… critical. It’s not uncommon for someone to take your image, modify it and reupload it for you to show how they would improve it. Or to tell you in very clear terms why they didn’t like what you did. Depending on your personality and what you’re looking for, this is either a good thing or a bad thing
- Great statistical rankings. In Top Photos, there are dozens’ of ways to view the highest ranked photos (e.g. by Average, by Views, by Originality, by Category, etc)
As a quick aside, I’ve mentioned rankings a couple of times here and the reason for that isn’t because I consider photography or these sites to be a competition, or that I have an inherent need to be told a good photo is good. It’s more to do with the issue I raised earlier about forcing me to look at my work quantitatively. It’s also due to the fact that when someone else has produced a good photo, I think it’s great that it is seen by as many people as possible. The easiest way to achieve that goal is to have a reward system which ranks good photos near the top somehow. So I’m all for things which help showcase good work when it’s done well – as these are the pictures that I learn the most from.
OK so back to Photo.net… so it’s great for rating and getting rated, but what’s wrong with it? Well, the community is quite set in its ways as a whole. So while I’m generalizing here of course but a picture typically has to be “technically correct” for it to do well (which means sharp, in focus, etc). Photos that don’t follow this path are usually marked down – often quite severely. The same goes for photos which require too much effort to interpret. So if an image is pretty, or clever (but not too clever), it’ll usually rate pretty well.
And what’s high? Well 5.0 / 7 for originality and / or aesthetics is doing well. There are many great photos on there with this ranking and it’s a score to be pleased with in most cases. Going up a bit, 5.5 / 7 usually means you’re doing great – a photo that would impress all but the harshest critics. 6.0 / 7 is a stunning pic in most cases – capable of being a finalist or winner of a competition on many other sites. For those of you who know or rate my photography – and to put the ratings into context, I have around 10 pictures in my portfolio which average around the 6.0 mark or slightly below.
Of course, it goes higher too – there are 6.5’s / 7 – this is reserved for a specific style of photography I am not sure I’ll ever be able to (or maybe will ever want to) reach.
Of course, as objective as it supposed to be – the ranking system is not always accurate. There is talk of “bots” (software programs) which deliberately rank down other photos. Also there are photographers who “swap” votes with each other, ensuring their pictures remain with as high a rating as possible.
So the solution, like with Pbase, is to use Photo.net for what it is useful for – that is, getting interesting critiques you won’t always find elsewhere, getting quantitative feedback which is always useful and perhaps most importantly, learning what it is about a certain type of audience that makes it tick. Understanding why one photo excelled while another bombed - I think these are vital lessons in the feedback process. As I said before too – their “top photos” section is also the best place to quickly see a distilled version of the most technically impressive photography on the Internet.
Alt Photos
(my Alt Photos site can be found here)
A friend of mine introduced me to Alt photos and it’s been perhaps the most interesting of all critique sites. As the name suggests, the photography here is meant to be a little alternative. Glamour shots, pictures of pretty flowers, landscapes with sunsets – these are all photos you can expect to be ignored. Instead, images which carry meaning, dark or melancholy scenes, alternative / experimental portraits and contemporary art all do exceptionally well. The site layout is very simple and like photos.net, their feedback / ranking system relies heavily on quantitative feedback. It works like this, you upload a photo and check it for review and it gets placed in the Most recent pictures. There, people view it and if they like it, they give it 3 points (there are also 1 and 2 points they can give but no one does this). It becomes a binary choice – someone likes your photo, you get three, someone doesn’t like it – they just move on. Critiques are allowed but pretty rare and hardly ever detailed.
Instead it’s a simple system of feedback that actually works very well.
So if 15 or 20 people have rated your image you’re on a points score of above 50 which means your photo is likely to be on the top 50 or so for that day. Get a score about 100 and you’re probably in the top 10 for that day and on the front page for that week. The significance of this? Well, it means your photo is up there with probably the most creative work I (and many others) have ever seen online. Unlike photo.net, it’s not always the most technically perfect from a classical standpoint – but it’s very likely to be thought provoking, original and quite brilliant also. I am fairly new to Alt Photos but again, to put things in perspective for those of you who know my work, I have a dozen or so photos over 50, with my highest score being 99.
Alt photos is probably the place I spend the most time browsing the top galleries for inspiration.
Other sites
Other sites of note which I’ve tried at some point are:
- www.dpchallenge.com – DPC is known for its weekly challenges. I encourage anyone whose not seen this site to go check it out. It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything there as each month that goes by I find myself to be moving further and further away from the style it prefers but there’s some great quality work on there and the weekly theme idea is excellent
- www.flickr.com – I know a lot of people rate it but I could never get on well with flickr. Maybe it’s the massive amount of traffic it does that means you have to invest so much time in their groups or communities. I’m prepared to be proved wrong tho if someone is prepared to write up the reasons why Flicrk rocks in a comment below
- www.fotologue.jp – Check this out if you haven’t. Not necessarily the best site for rating / communities / critiques but it produces some of the best looking portfolios. I should spend more time there
OK so that’s about all I have to say on this topic for now. I have always wanted to share this information as I feel I have got so much out of the rapid feedback cycle that critique sites can provide and hopefully you’ll find this of some use too. Finally, as I mentioned before, like any kind of feedback – the trick is to put feedback in the right context and perspective, something I’m still always trying to perfect :)
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