These days, everyone and his brother are building blogs and sites and publishing photographies online. Publishing content, both graphic and writen is at reach of virtually anyone.
People now have better ways to show their work without the “patronage” of an employer. Even good ways to promote their work in order to get a first job in the first place.
If you compare with, say, 15 years ago, when news were printed and pictures appeared only in books and magazines you’ll see that today anyone can be a photographer, designer or a journalist-a-like. Not necessarily a good one, though.
In this article, I will give some hints for people that aspire to sucessful publish pictures online for a big audience.
Do not show too much of a good thing
It is common to take lots, sometimes hundreds of pictures of a subject that we are atracted to and, for the surprise of many newcomers, most professional photographers take endless amounts of pictures on a single essay just to pick a couple of them.
There are two reasons for that.
- If you show two pictures that are very similar, eventually one of them will be more appreciated than the other, and because there are too similar, the worse will take away the bright of the other.
- If you publish several pictures that are the similar, eventually the viewer will get bored of them all, even though he may have found the first one fantastic.
Did you ever wanted to eat only the filling of a lot of chocolate cookies when you were a child? Well, if you ever did it chances are that you found that it was too much of a good thing and you ended up not liking it as much as you expected. The same goes for pictures.
Do not publish learning material
If you have two pictures of the same subject that you find both have qualities and defects and it would be nice to have qualities of both, congratulations! Your eye as a photographer is getting better and you are learning from your pictures.
However, those are probably not publishing material, there are still things you want to improve on them. Refrain from publishing them, go back to your subject and try to apply what you’ve learned from the previous session.
However, keep in mind that on photography is not only the technical merit that counts. If you have two pictures of a very unique event that you wouldn’t be able to shoot again then you may have very nice material on your hands. Choose one and publish, make a wise option between them, but keep in mind the first hint.
Think about your audience
One thing in photography is to shot what people want to see just for the popularity. You should take pictures of what you want and for your own pleasure, based on your own criteria. However, publishing pictures is something else.
That nice picture you took of your grandma that is a major favorite among your family may really be uninteresting for anyone that doesn’t know the good old lady. A generic viewer won’t have a sentimental regard of your personal picures. The same goes to the pictures you took clubbing with your friends or on vacation.
If your intended audience is friends and family this may not apply to you. Maybe you can have the most visited blog of your college or workplace, but if you intend to reach a bigger audience you must think what may be uninteresting for them and keep this to those who really may like to see it.
Be patient
This is one of the most important hints in about anything in life.
Nobody can build a nice portfolio in a couple of weeks. Be patient and dedicate yourself to the pictures, follow the previous hints and be conscious about what you publish.
Sure you want to have a thousand pictures on your site and be an awarded photographer, but, also, you would like to have a flawless portfolio, and recieve only nice comments from people.
This just won’t happen if you publish about anything that you shot. There are millions of galleries of random pictures around, there is no reason for someone to come back to yours unless this person is friend or family. If you bore your public they won’t come back.
If you keep your submissions at a nice pace, with only quality pictures, they probably will end up singing up to your newsletter, reading your feed or bookmark your site to come back later.
If you dedicate yourself to work the pictures instead of the volume of the site one day you’ll wake up and find that you have a reasonable amount of pictures and far more page views that other fellow photographers that publish ten times as much as you.
Have fun!
2 Comments
Great article. If we want to cook or photograph by hobby, we can have more fun if we learn how to do right, making mistakes. I think the most important is to have fun walking the path, without worrying about the objectives.
I agree with Fabio. Great article indeed!
It’s all about having fun and passion during the path. Don’t try to copy others, let your personality touch your work in a way that will make it very unique. There are thousands of information available in the internet, free… if you don’t build something special, you will be just one in a crowd. And of course there is a big range of audience, some will not like your style, don’t give up.
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