How Flickr Is Courting the Next Generation of Photographers 97
First time accepted submitter Molly McHugh writes Flickr Vice President Bernardo Hernandez explains how the beloved photo platform is targeting a new generation that's addicted to smartphones. “10 or 15 years ago it was expensive and complicated to explore the world of photography,” Hernandez said. "Very few people could afford that—[it is] no surprise the best photographers 20 years ago were older people. We believe all of that is changing with the mobile [photography] revolution."
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Too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Flickr already missed the boat on being the social media image sharping app of choice.
So now they're missing the next boat by trying to be that instead. It's like the microsoft infinite loop, but now yahoo instead.
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Whoosh (Score:3)
Flickr already missed the boat on being the social media image sharping app of choice.
They are not the social media sharing app of choice.
They ARE the primary choice for sharing images from people who are photographers, and also happen to primarily use smartphones. Yes, even over sites like 500px... Flickr has far more volume.
Re:Whoosh (Score:5, Insightful)
They were the primary choice for sharing photos amongst photographers back before Yahoo! bought them out. Yahoo! systematically destroyed everything that the photographers liked. At every turn they ignored the feedback of PAYING users. Some of the most talented artists dropped out and went to deviantart, or some others I can't remember the name of. These days they switch to Facebook, or just started hosting their own photos.
Exploring new artists became challenging and tedious. It seemed like the only way to make the front page was to have some washed out HDR crap. The community has dwindled dramatically; maybe not in numbers, but the sense of actually belonging to a community of like-minded artists has certainly faded. I hardly post, and most of my contacts hardly post anymore either. I primarily use it for a place to keep family photos instead of my art photography.
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Well said. They put all their resources into screwing up the interface into an unholy mess, while never fixing obvious things like being able to follow discussion threads, which would actually help bolster a community.
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Bad Panda (Score:3)
By showing bad panda errors instead of the image requested for months so you get people who want to avoid your site at all costs? Yeah, that's how to court users.
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And they still haven't fixed the problem where when you are browsing photos in a busy group it jumps around and refreshes randomly so you keep losing your place.
Expensive and complicated? (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought my first 16mm camera for less than $10 (the flash cubes were more expensive!). B&W film was cheap, developing the negs was cheap too. I was 11 or so and that was the late 80s. You paid a lot more attention to ISO and shutter speed settings when you had to wait a week for a roll to be developed and find out which shots worked and which ones didn't. By the 90s in high school I could develop my own film, which really just took some minimal education.
10 - 15 years ago you could get a decent 35mm for under $100 and photo development was cheap and common enough to fully automate at a kiosk in the mall
SLR / DSLR prices have pretty much kept pace with the times.
So what exactly was pricey about "exploring the world of photography"?
Re:Expensive and complicated? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, sort of. There has been a much larger outlay of cash necessary to break into digital photography. You may realize a break even point sooner if you would have shot lot of rolls of film, but the initial barrier to entry is much higher than it was for film cameras, which really only needed to be a light-tight box. Having said that, the price of good digital cameras has come down a lot since the late 90s, so what I observe is more of a trough where film was pretty much phased out yet digital cameras we
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"... photo development was cheap and common enough to fully automate at a kiosk in the mall."
And why, pray tell, would someone who cared about photographic quality process film and make prints at a kiosk in the mall? Crappy processing and crappy prints, and with automated printing and color correction you have no idea as to what the hell went wrong (or right) with your images.
Shoot pro-grade E100, or Velvia, and you paid $10-12 per roll of film plus $10/roll commercial processing, or at least $20/roll combi
Thankfully, everyone is a photographer now... (Score:2, Funny)
Wow, that's a great photo, you must have a very good phone.
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You mock, but I know that a lot of my best photographs are because my camera's bloody good, not because I am.
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It's always 90% photgrapher, 10% equipment. You have to learn to use your equipment, and that holds for a mobile phone as well as a DSLR with good lenses. And you need talent. That's all in the 90%.
laugh (Score:3, Funny)
“10 or 15 years ago it was expensive and complicated to explore the world of photography,”
Polaraoid...
Instamatic...
You know like all those shit filter apps in your iPhone...
...the best photographers were older people... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is still the truth, in general. Photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography with a digital camera -- knowing what f-stop is, or shutter speed, or focal length, or a LOT of the other of the fine-grain minutiae that comes from a lot of time spent with film and digital cameras taking hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs.
Point and click it ain't.
Re:...the best photographers were older people... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:...the best photographers were older people... (Score:5, Insightful)
All that experience can be accumulated hundreds of times faster in digital where you can see immediate results.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that for the vast majority. Why worry about composition, aperture, exposure, and white balance when one can burn through dozens upon dozens of photos, previewing the results immediately waiting for something worthwhile to show up, and sort/crop/align later. I've seen this first hand with my daughters and their friends. The shotgun approach may produce the occasional interesting photos but does not lead to refined skills required to produce stunning images.
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Because you may have a limited time frame and only one occasione to get the shot right so you need to know your stuff. Know about depth of field, shutter times and exposure. You can correct exposure some later, but you're not going to get blur out of your precious shot.
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You're being obtuse. The people taking photos like the ones your talking about would never and will never be serious photographers. They're not the ones to think about. The ones to think about are the ones that are actually taking it seriously. The reduced time interval between taking a shot, viewing the shot and taking it again if need be greatly accelerates the learning process. Assuming that you're actually evaluating the results and trying to improve.
People who aren't trying to improve will likely never
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You aren't disagreeing with the grandparent, you're talking about apples while he's talking
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I'm going to have to disagree with you as well :)
My brother started taking photography seriously when he was living in Japan for a year. Within a year he went from being general capable (I can take a picture and that's it) to being fairly expert. Enough that he considered briefly making a living doing photography. He credits a lot of that rapid growth to getting instant feedback. Yes, people just taking pictures willy nilly and & looking at the results by itself does not make for fast skill building. Bu
Re:...the best photographers were older people... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, there's something to be said about the "old way". Where it took days from when you took your photo to when you got it back.
It meant you had to work at your shot - you had to compose it perfectly, get the exposure right and all the other stuff. Then click the frame.
If you were good, you didn't take extra shots "just in case". You knew that after waiting the few days for the photo to come back, it'll be good.
Today's digital camera? Just click away mindlessly until it comes out right. Trial and error. Just snap snap snap. You know the drill - after that trip you come back with 10,000 snaps, and then filter out through the whole lot to find the few that are keepers. Because the rest would be garbage.
Which approach is better? Hard to tell. Though truth be told, equipment actually doesn't matter. National Geographic photographers have intentionally gone on trips equipped with nothing more than an iPhone and still take stunning photos using nothing more than the default camera app.
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With so many capable instruments in the hands of so many young minds, art is bound to happen.
To keep our eye on the ball, we must appreciate that, in this case, the ball is not the little round thing. It's not the photographer and it's not the camera ... it's the photograph.
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Giving word processors to lobotomized monkeys is not going to produce art, no matter what.
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Your post sorta confirms that, doesn't it?
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With so many capable instruments in the hands of so many young minds, art is bound to happen
For certain values of "art".
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My assertion comes from experience with crowd sourcing and what I've experienced assisting young lads and lasses in the mechanics of taking photographs with small cameras.
By way of what reasoning do you prejudge the value of art not yet produced?
Re:...the best photographers were older people... (Score:5, Insightful)
But my rate of "keepers" per trip has skyrocketed. With film I'd be happy if I managed just 2-3 keepers from a trip. With digital I expect 5+ and am disappointed if I don't get 10. This is because I shoot a lot more pictures with digital than I ever shot with film. The cost of the professional film I used + developing meant I was paying $0.50-$1 per shot. That put a serious damper on photography. I think the most film I ever shot on a trip was 12 rolls (432 pictures) over 4 weeks, or an average of 15 shots a day. With digital I'll take 2000-3000 shots on a similar trip, or 70-110 shots a day.
FWIW, the rate of keepers seems to be consistent (between 1 in 50 to 1 in 100) among both amateurs and professionals. i.e. The pro photographers aren't getting those great shots by snapping a few pictures. National Geographic did an article on how they make articles. The photographer shot over 5000 photos (on film!) to arrive at the 8 photos used in the article.
Equipment does matter. Photography isn't just a matter of seeing something cool and snapping a picture of it. Wide-angles can give you unusual perspectives. Better equipment gives you access to different capabilities. Telephotos allow you to compress perspective, as well as pick out distant subjects without having to run all over. A wider aperture lens can blur the backgrounds more in portraits. Flash exposure compensation can allow you to use a flash, but make the picture look like it was shot without a flash. Zooming during the exposure followed by a flash can create an impressionistic effect which emphasizes the subject. etc.
I recently drove some European friends to San Francisco. Unfortunately we arrived right around dusk, and they weren't able to get a decent shot of themselves with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. I simply borrowed one of their DSLRs, mounted it on a tripod, put it in aperture priority mode, turned the flash on with FEC dialed to about -1.0, and told them to stand perfectly still for a few seconds. When you do that, the DSLR automatically adjusts the exposure time for the background, but exposes the foreground by modulating the flash. The result was a perfect image of the bridge and city lights in the background, with my friends perfectly exposed in the foreground.
That was GP's point - that better equipment gives you access to more options and different things you can do to take different and better pictures. While it's certainly possible to take good photos with a smartphone, the number of different types of good photos you can take is considerably less than with a DSLR and good lenses. OP misinterpreted GP's post as a film vs digital thing.
Weasel worded. (Score:3)
There are also thousands of artists today that equal the top handful of masters of old times, it simply isn't acknowledge because it is subjective, and appreciation is inherently relative
1 Make a bold, dramatic assertion.
2 and. in your next breath, argue that is useless to offer any proof.
Such a talent is wasted in tech, You really ought to go into politics.
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Heh, yeah, photographers can get more experience in digital format, but your average smartphone of your average person is still not going to cut it.
You don't need a DSLR anymore, but you do need some decent lenses (the more the better) and manual controls. And then, you can start accumulating experience. Until I can pop a 8mm fisheye or 300mm telephoto or 25mm F1.2 onto a phone, point and click it still isn't.
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Oh, I completely forgot my other point besides experience. To even begin to get that kind of experience, you need something that only older (20+) people have: money.
Unless your parent's have the equipment already (or the money to buy it), you as a teenager probably won't even know a number called the F-stop exists. Hell, I wonder if most teenagers who're snapping away on their phones know what ISO sensitivity is.
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Bulldust. You are being elitist, at best.
When I was a young lad and Moby Dick was a minnow, I studied special relativity. The math requires extracting a square root.
I was really frustrated because doing square roots with paper and pencil is a game whose quest is coming up with the same answer three times in a row.
When calculators with the square root function finally arrived, my learning accelerated because my goddamn objective was not to find square roots ... it was to visualize, through the math, what spe
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In that sense, the technical stuff you covet is a waste of a good photographer's time.
I learned photography on a .3Mp (not a typo ... POINT 3Mp) camera and even today, 13 years later, those old photographs tickle the eyeballs. It didn't have any knobs, so screw the technical bullshit like ISO and F-stop.
It's all about the photograph.
The photograph is incredibly different depending on f-stop. I can use the same exposure (shutter/fstop combination), the same framing, the same ISO, the same lighting, the same subject, the same camera, the same lens and give you two entirely visually and artistically different photographs just by changing the f-stop.
Now tell me, if it's all about the photograph, which of those two photographs is it about? Are you going to trust to random luck or are you going to use the technical stuff that's a waste of ti
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I'll take the one I like the best.
That's kinda like choosing between two paintings only AFTER I determine what oils the artist used.
What does it matter?
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It matters because some fucking dork with no understanding wont take two pictures, they'll take one.
So basically you're going on blind random fucking luck, not actually using skill and intent to take the right photograph.
It is indeed all about the photograph. Shame that your approach means you'll often miss out on it.
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This isn't strictly true. Old school photographers learned on theory and then applied it to a situation. Instant feedback is good but I see a lot of new photographers half ass it and just shoot in auto mode ap/tv with out thinking about the image before hand. Any master photographer will tell you it's all about pre conceiving the image before you even get your lens cap off and then capturing the perfect moment. Instant feedback won't make another Ansel Adams any faster.
There is a reason why I was able to ge
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There are also thousands of artists today that equal the top handful of masters of old times
That's not how the arts work, I'm afraid.
All that matters on the phone too (Score:2)
Photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography with a digital camera -- knowing what f-stop is, or shutter speed, or focal length, or a LOT of the other of the fine-grain minutiae
1) the technical aspects are not really photography - they are details of a tool. They are not composition nor lighting nor mood nor concept.
2) The iPhone with iOS8, and version of Android for a while I think let you control all of those aspects in advanced camera apps (well focal length you had to add adaptor lenses,
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Photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography with a digital camera -- knowing what f-stop is, or shutter speed, or focal length, or a LOT of the other of the fine-grain minutiae
1) the technical aspects are not really photography - they are details of a tool. They are not composition nor lighting nor mood nor concept.
2) The iPhone with iOS8, and version of Android for a while I think let you control all of those aspects in advanced camera apps (well focal length you had to add adaptor lenses, but lots of people do use those).
Knowing the craft of f-stop, shutter speed, etc. is only a part of photography. People can take really good photos without knowing these things. The difference is that someone who is well versed in the technical aspects can take a good photo in more challenging conditions. In addition that person will also be able to be more creative and produce images using techniques that the camera computer would fail miserably at.
In general, photography has come a long way. Digital photography has allowed people wit
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I disagree, somewhat.
I teach young people how to use digital point and shoot cameras. I tell them, "See this toggle dial? Go up, down, left and right until you like what you see." (we're in Program mode)
Some of them consistently produce art.
If you ask them, "What F-stop and ISO settings did you use?" they will give you a blank look and direct you to the exif information inside the file to see all that historical settings data.
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As a techie, I learned the technical stuff fairly easily, it's the artistic part that's hard.
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Actually, it is sorta point and click. These are young people. Remember that age?
Old farts like us play by the rules.
Young people who don't know the difference between bullshit and wild honey can do things that you and I WISH we had thought of.
Hell. kids shoot first, and point later.
I think it's great.
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No, photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography that deals with fine grained minutiae. But, so what? Technical minutiae isn't art. It's what geeks a
Licensing issues (Score:2, Informative)
Didn't they already get in trouble for essentially requiring in perpetuity licensing for uploading photos to their service?
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Flikr has CC licensing. IIRC, you have to opt in to the Getty thing.
the photography equivalent of tweeting (Score:4)
There's something to be said for having a camera (no matter how feeble) with you at all times, but aren't we getting tired of pictures of food and blurry portraits taken in the bathroom? People are taking this great thing (a camera with you always) and making it inane. There will inevitably be a backlash. Personally I've stopped taking photos with my phone, except in emergencies (like for accident evidence) when I don't have a "real" camera on me.
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> How is ubiquity of cameras making them inane exactly?
I don't mean to imply such a close cause and effect. I'm commenting that for whatever reason, we as a society are taking what is arguably a cool thing and turning it into something inane. It's not the ubiquity of cameras that's making them inane, it's the use to which they are put.
For every photo or video that makes headlines or brings down a crooked cop, there are millions of banal selfies or photos of burritos. It's just exactly as depressing as
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The issue isn't inanity - each photo posted on Facebook means something to someone.
The challenge is curation. How do you find the great photographs.
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Bulldust.
It's like hearing you say, "Aren't we getting tired of all the inane posts on Facebook? I never post comments on the Internet unless it's to report a crime on the city police web site."
You deal with "noise" on the Internet all the time.
Your comment about a "real" camera makes it inherently obvious to the most casual observer that you are not a "real" photographer.
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If I'm not a "real" photographer, I sure have enough people fooled to make a decent living.
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I don't think you are a professional photographer. Sorry, but you just don't smell right.
Move Over Ansel Adams... (Score:1)
Step aside old photography masters for the new wave. Who wants composed, national park scenery when you can hang overexposed, blurry pictures of food on your wall?
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Actually there are some Ansel Adams photogs still out there. At Mountain View, CA Art and Wine festival earlier this month, a photographer had awesome and beautiful photographs (and they weren't cheap) of various nature shots including nighttime exposures. He uses film, yes that material where you press the button on the camera and hear various mechanical noises. But no idea if it is good or not until film is developed. Then continuing on in a dark room expose these negatives on to paper which immerse into
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it would be nice if webpage is decent arrangement (Score:2)
Antiquated features, disloyal to paying users (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the guy saying here??? (Score:1)
FTA: "Over the next few months, the site will be unifying its design to a modern style guide, making it more visually consistent and more responsive. “Most importantly we’re also changing the technology behind that: We're going from PHP to JAVA."
Is he talking about running Java on their servers? Or forcing the users to run Java to see the web pages?
The current Flickr site uses JavaScript to show the page, and their YUI library is buggy and abandoned (as of their August 2014 announcement).
They re
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It'll be Java on the server to replace the PHP on the server. Nobody writes Java applets any more. If they do it will be the end - do Java applets even run on phones? I've not seen one (by which I mean a "You need a Java Applet Plugin" placeholder) for years.
I just take issue at the "Most Importantly". How is that most important? Because the end-user shouldn't care. The only people to whom its most important are the Java devs getting the gig. I suspect the PHP devs getting their final wages might be a bit u
Thanks to flickr (Score:1)
Revisionist history (Score:2)
And like it or not, they are complete utter shit compared to real equipment.
And while a good photographer can make decent photos with a smartphone if they work within their limitations, "Photographers" is a very generous term for what most people are capable of doing.
papers please... (Score:2)
So that's why you can't even sign up for an account without surrendering your mobile number and complying with SMS activation... they're after the cell phone photographer generation now, who are used to this sort of bending over for service....
Have You Used The Flickr App? (Score:1)
It pretty much stinks. I always say that the best camera is the one in your hands, and most of the time that's my iPhone 5s, not my Nikon D810. But the 5s is pretty lousy for any kind of post processing, so I AirDrop images to my iPad Air.
But after all this time, and woo hoo over new versions of the Flickr app, it's still not really an iPad app-it's still an iPhone app on a iPad (oh, yeah, it's got a crappy digital zoom 2X mode, right). Oh, you CAN upload via the IOS photos app, but even that's kinda lame.
flickr is obsolete (Score:2)
I used flickr years ago, then I switched to 500px. Yesterday I wanted to check out how flickr looks now, I did basic test - display best photos. On 500px you can just click "popular" and you can browse amazing photography. How to do it on flickr? After few minutes I resigned, because all I saw was just crap.
Best photogs of 20 yrs ago were 'older' because .. (Score:2)
... it takes time to become a good photographer .... or painter, or sculptor, or any other artist.
It's called 'skill', and it takes time to refine to the point that others recognise it.
Some people have 'talent' and blossom quickly, but that is rare now, just as it was then.
Also the point is completely incorrect; getting in to photography isn't easier today! A decent camera was available for $200 way back 20 years ago. And young folks who were interested in photography, paid the price. Just as young folks