
First let me say that I don’t hate photography outright. Maybe even at all. Maybe I just hate people sometimes. I take pictures, I enjoy taking pictures. Sometimes I do it for myself, but more recently I’ve been doing it to improve. I’ve spent alot of time reading strobist, DIYPhotography, etc — trying to learn, trying to broaden my ways. Part of this requires me taking/posting pictures and getting reviews. The first part (post pictures) I’ve got down. The second part is where the “I hate people” comes into play.
When I post a larger batch of pictures, especially ones I’m trying to do nicely — I email or IM links to my friends. I doubt that I get responses from my friends more than maybe 30% of time. When I do get a response, its something to the effect of “cool” or “nice”. I’m glad you appreciate my handy work, but could you say something more constructive. Please. If you say “nice”, It doesn’t help me. Please, tell me which pictures you like, and why. More importantly, tell me which pictures you dislike and why. This HELPS. I want criticism of my pictures. I need a semi-objective 3rd party reviewing my work.
I realize that some of my friends, like John, aren’t particularly artsy. So thats ok. I don’t expect every single person to be an art critic. At least John asked for a print of one of my pictures — first time anyone ever asked for a print of any of my work. A number of my other friends are artistically enabled (more specifically they do photography). Of course they don’t read my blog — so they’ll never get this message. I know this is a rant, but it just terribly frustrates me when I finally do get a response from one of my very good friends and all she says is “I prefer the older black and whites”, ignoring the new color ones that I was specifically working on. Ok, Fine, I can accommodate that. So I go and take some B&W shots and email her a link. Nothing. Nada. No response. Not even a reply back saying “cool, thanks”. I know she got the email… but… what ever.
Of course, I post my pictures publicly to flickr, but I’m not a “Big name”. You really have to gather some friends on flickr before anyone will even look at your photo’s let alone comment on them. I’m trying, but I don’t blame flickr. Oh well, I guess I’ll just stop bothering to tell my friends. If they aren’t going to comment (and sometimes I question if they even look), why bother with the aggravation of even trying.