Websites every photographer needs to visit and bookmark
Comin’ at you on a beautiful Thursday…..I mean Sunday—UPDATE——— SCRATCH ALL THAT WE BACK ON THURSDAYS NOW——— (because my hay fever/sinus infection got the better of me). I want to reveal some of my tricks over time and in this edition of the Bendersama Blog I want to focus on some websites I personally still use or value greatly. These site started me on my photography path, but moreover they are great tools to use in tandem with your learning from experience, workshops, or schooling. Let’s crank these out, however I’ll state this now; while they are/were useful to me, results may vary for you.
Photography Social Social Media Sites
FLICKR
Some will tell you that this site WAS a great source of fellow photographers talking shop about gear, tech issues, clients, and composition. the same would tell you that this site is dead and should be written off. I’ll tell you now that with the recent Flickr buyout by SmugMug, and the Verizon buyout of Yahoo, no long will statements like:
"There's really no such thing as professional photographers anymore." - Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer 2013
..will no longer be tolerated. Make no bones about it, as this site was crashing and burning to knowingly subpar photographers and Second Life fursonas (don’t ask…), 500px picked up where Flickr dropped the ball. How so ever why I will never back a site like 500px, despite the pretty little site’s polish, is because of the privacy issues I’ve had in the past to stalkers and harassers. I’ll tolerate harsh criticism, but in the past I’ve had a couple people knowingly imitate, fervently follow, and unapologetically go over many personal lines. To that end I’ve had a back and forth with admins of 500px and their response is “Sorry, nothing we can do.”. Not even a block button coded for a profile; but over on Flickr you can not only do everything with a community of users and if you ever have a problem with one of them you CAN block them.
Now I said this before, but it bears worth repeating, I stand by Flick and the new wave of REAL PHOTOGRAPHERS that come in hungry to share and socialize. It will take time, but when Flickr returns to greatness I’ll still be there, and I suggest you to go there, post your work, and make some friends.
Informative Equipment Reviews
When I started out I looked at sites like fredmiranda.com and thought the users smugness towards a lens being slightly soft or heavier than they cared for. That was when I didn’t know that weight over time would be an issue, or the fact that a certain zoom lens extended and how this would cause issues. It find it now that FREDMIRANDA.COM is a valuable resource of boards in a time and place photography boards of “quality” are in short supply. One that I did and still do respect and admire is DPREVIW.COM. It has grown exponentially, but it still keeps up with their “lens data” review which is my bread and butter. Every lens has a “sweet spot” and DPReview’s lens data helps illustrate it in cool graphs and colors easy to understand. For example (popping out in a new window) you can see that the “lens data” on Canon’s 40mm pancake lens, on a Canon EOS 7D body, will show that while the vignette on the lens @ f/2.8 on the corners is a little soft, it goes away at f/4 and beyond. Also, the optimal sharpness of the lens tends to side on f/8 and anything under, while useable, tends to be soft under f/8. That would leads someone to understand the optimal setting for the 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens is f/8 (which is kinda rough as on average sweet spots tend to be one stop under the fastest setting). Beyond me explaining this you can see it on the graphs and come to that conclusion yourself, which is why I’m so big on dpreview.com! Another great site is Photons to Photos! This site is new to my bookmarks but it’s really rising up the charts as a data reviewer. The niche behind this site, beyond auditing the next site I’ll mention, is to offering a clear representation of the data gathered on each camera’s dynamic range at any specific film speed (ISO). The line graph shows points where the dynamic range also falls off at a specific ISO. This offers you the best range to use your camera, and where to expect the IQ (image quality) dip at higher ISOs. Of course you can compare cameras’ dynamic range when deciding on upgrades or brand transition. The site that this needs to audit occasionally is DXOMark. Now I would have kinder things to say about the site, but with the rating system, their slow-to-lab-review new lenses and camera bodies, and their disconnect from solid photographer gear to cell phone sensors MAY be ahead of the times, but does nothing for me as a resource.
News, Creative, and Educational Sites
If you waltz away from this blog with anything, let it be STROBIST. Strobist is the BEST site on how to learn lighting, types of lighting, and lighting gear, and set-ups… to those new to photography the etymology of “Photo Graphy” is literally “Light Drawing” so learning light is paramount. Short of this site another fun site to visit is ThePhotoblogger. It’s articles on creative photography may be what you need to jog the creative juices. Another creative and newsworthy site is fStoppers. This site, in the beginning was the buzzfeed of photography sites (which I don’t rank personally very high). I’ve been back and forth over a few years and while there are a handful of millennial hipster authors, the quality has gotten better with time and should be, at its core an interesting readthrough. Lastly I want to touch on the rumor mill sites. Canon Rumors and Nikon Rumors really help give you a peak at what’s on the horizon for their respective company’s tech.
Now that should cover all my DIGITAL photography resources, my film adds a few more vintage lens reviewers, and the addition of 4chan’s /p/ board (if you can tread through the flamewars and smug), reddit’s r/photography and r/analog subbreddits. Sites like the ones just listed aren’t really MY recommendations as they don’t cater entirely to the new photographer or those not savvy with the ways of internet culture. I would finish this off by saying that a resources value is relative to the person using it, and while there is other sites and communities you could go with or mention, the ones I just listed will take you far if you delve and only if you delve into each site. Best of luck, and I hope these links help!
Questionnaire Results & Actions Taken
Hey folks! I told a lot of you over the last few weeks that I had a questionnaire to help shape the site and I got a lot of input on where I should focus my efforts.
Hey folks! I told a lot of you over the last few weeks that I had a questionnaire to help shape the site and I got a lot of input on where I should focus my efforts. If you don't wanna hear me drone on and on skip to the pie charts and what that means, but for those of you who are sticking around, lemme explain why I did this. Primarily, I'm a dreamer. I have aspirations toward not only photography projects in the future, but I tend to live in the future where the next logical step of growth is product X, Y, and Z. A good amount of these things are grounding and humbling, and while the "market" for certain things is low right now. I see a future for it in the next few years...but that's where things are gonna wait. By all means, I'm not dialing things back because I wasn't getting the answers I wanted, I'm putting things on the backburner because Woodstock doesn't even know my brand's name yet. So to that let's see why I got to that conclusion and where I go with this information.
Is this your first time to the site?
Do you frequent the site
What brings you to the site?
So of the people polled; I have a small following of regulars, and of those people, they come for what I'm trying to push. This is a start, but needs growth. Let's talk blog. I'm not going to get into the like/share/comment because it fell flat and completely which leads me to the first implementation: Going forward with the site, blogs will not have comments, likes, or shares (this can't help if some templates have that built in). Putting attention or concern into who is or is not commenting or contributing and moderating that is a waste of time and attention. So, then let's talk about the future of the blog.
I want more _______ related blogs.
Results are in! I'll say this much, there was a LOT of hate toward product and gear reviews, which worries me as the gear reviews were to go hand in hand with the planned buyers guide for photography. On a side tangent, that book is/was supposed to be gear toward the person asking "what camera should I get?". Due to the volume of people uninterested in gear (which will only affect how frequent these posts show up), my hand is forced and decisions are made:
Going forward the book planned for the holiday season is suspended indefinitely.
Blogs will continue to have Upcoming Projects featured, but the "Photography Techniques" will show up in the blogs soon. the "Slice of Life" blogs/vlogs may require a separate channel....maybe on that "Bendersama Channel". IF...if I go through with it, I won't be there regularly like a BDoublO100 Family vlog or even a Casey Naistat. I just can't put myself and my family in a spotlight that won't be regular and should be more on photography. I never rule things out though...
On the topic of the buyer's guide being suspended, I wanted to at least offer photography ground level lessons or some kind of tutorials. This was supposed to be sister products one leading to the other. Being that as such I wanted to get peoples intention of learning an art form and trade. That lead to the next group of questions:
Are you a photographer
So you answered anything but "Yes", honestly that's great! That means you are in the market to learn.
Would you want to learn about photography
Well, that definitely speaks for itself. Not interested in gear because the people majoritively are not interested in learning photography. That's not to say things may change over time, but that gives me the freedom to focus back on what is important. While it's bittersweet, not once did I ever get the impression that these opinions are permanent. Now, this isn't to diminish those that do want to learn. Those that want to learn had great suggestions on avenues they wanted to learn and even pay to learn: one on one, workshops, and even videos tutorials. To those people; contact me bender@bendersama.com, if you are interested. Otherwise, we move on for now to greener pastures.
This brings us to the last bastion of secondary sources of income, beyond the primary clients, the store. Products beyond the prints, print sizes, and availability of prints were the topics of discussion and some big changes have been and will be made. Let's dive in:
TOPIC: I would buy other merchandise from the store to diversify
What size prints would you like to see
So what this and the other questions asked tells me is that a variety of prints needs to be added. So, in another announcement I can make: Going forward, the STORE now carries a variety of sizes of each print ready to print and ship via a local print company who can cater to larger prints. This coupled upon how people believe the current price of my 13 x 19 print is more than fairly priced (previously $10/ now $12) means I can give a more a variety at lesser the projected price. On the topic of Limited Print Runs to Open Print Runs, there's no denying that limited print runs at this early of a store's conception alienates a good amount of people. Consumers don't want to buy a single run or limited run of prints for what they feel is no different (other than supply amount, paper type, and numbered certificate) at more the price. So. Going forward, all limited and single print runs are open! Certification of authentication will be supplied as will a number of the print, but will not be of a certain print amount unless stated in the future. That means C M Y K, Poison the Mind, Epic, and Clarity are all open runs and in a variety of sizes.
What does that mean for those who already were gifted or purchased prints? For the backers that helped fix my camera, the limited or "small batch" papers used to print those will not be the same as the photography prints done on luster paper now and in the future. To my best customer; we worked out a deal, and I'll leave it as that. So with the exclusivity for most gone where does, that leave the demographic who would pay more for a less amount in the "print pool". Reserves. Going forward; any prints scheduled to come out (winter run) will have a reserve gift with purchase. The print may come as a variant in color, or come with and extra print, or something else (maybe a USB stick of a digital print version for a wallpaper, maybe special wrapping). The fact is those will be limited to 5, and if you don't act on it, that's it. They won't show up at the store, they won't be available any other way except as a reserve to the forthcoming related print release.
....and that as they say is that. This covers how I will be handling the store and the blog on the revamped site coming later in July. I'll be signing off her and now for about a week as I get to planning and shooting for assets on the site, but don't think dear reader for one instance that I'm disheartened by some of these avenues not fully being open and accepting. I see it as a sign to stick with what I know, to help my store's inventory and fill it with prints. Arguably you all wanna see more in the store and I intend to make good on that monthly, so I'll be busy working on this and you come back soon....eh, not too soon.
Thanks for stopping by, and see you again soon!
Bendersama