A picture-sharing site like Flickr contains the work of tens of thousands of talented amateurs, all of them capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere. If only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year. Most of the drudgery of identifying good, relevant pictures is also done here – by the photographers themselves, who tag them, and by the other users, who notice them and have their interest recorded by the software.
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we are all photographers now! 
Saturday, December 29, 2007 at 16:32 |
There is no demise of professional photographers by amateur photographers. What is professional photography? How many areas of photography are there? What array of skills are required to produce a particular type of photograph? There have always been keen photographers who make great images. Operating as a photographer in the marketplace has never been easy. It’s just trickier now.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 19:00 |
That’s ridiculous, for one a professional is someone you go to for shots of X, Y, Z that you know will be good, you can’t sit around and wait for an amateur to accidentally take a photograph of your product, model, war, etc. Also I think the quality to crap ratio is quite a bit lower than 1%. Finally, crowd-sources popularity is no way to rank photos. Has this writer ever seen the Explore page? I guess every magazine wants selective focus HDR photos of babies, puppies and water drops with saturation jacked up? Yes, there is excellent work on Flickr, but just like real life, it has to be curated by dedicated gatekeepers and you have to dig deep to find it.