Category: Uncategorized

Just echoing what Om Malik wrote a few weeks ago. Social Media is dead.

This is actually a great thing. Not that I was ever in danger of this, but I won’t have to worry about Instant or Viral Fame compromising my art. When I go outside, I won’t have anybody say, “You’re that guy on that social!”

No, my dear follow artists, we can go back to the work without worrying about the algorithm or downloading the latest and greatest app, which honestly would just get weaponized against us anyways.

This means going back to IRL networking. Don’t worry people totally forgot how to fake smiles these days, and you can catch one a mile away. It also means exploring dark forests: discord chats, or members only websites.

“We are drowning in the obscurity and the water’s lovely. Won’t you join us?”

In my last post I wrote about my digital detox – tl;dr: no trolls or algorithms manipulating you. “Free your mind,” Morpheus says in The Matrix. A digital detox does exactly that.

What then does my post detox photo work flow look like. Let’s talk about an old way first: grow an audience on socials to market to by making digital photos. Make a physical zine. Sell it on socials. Rinse and repeat.

During my detox, I saw this work flow as problematic. Photography became reduced to marketing and the world reduced to a photographic resource. I’m not saying this is evil but the world is more than just a resource and great photos are more than just marketing. A photographic work flow like this could and often does produce interesting work, but the artistic integrity of it from a Gadamerian sense is compromised. “Seeking to be liked or admired—this is the surest way to fail as an artist.”

What is my new work flow? The physical image is the basic unit of my work. This means that any social media is an after thought or a hint of the actual work, and not the work itself. This means a photo I make doesn’t even touch social media. The new work flow is photograph, develop, print contact sheets and/or prints, and then edit photos into a collection. I won’t be bothered with scanning, unless there is already a print. My social media use is merely meta commentary on work & life, but not the commentary itself.

This new work flow could also be fitted with digital tools as long as it’s all about the print.

There are some disadvantages. I’m basically saying no to growing my audience on social media. But this is ok, because as Gary Vee says, “You don’t determine the quality of your creative; your audience does.” Whenever Garyvee sees an influencer close to missing a deadline because of perfectionism, he’ll tell them something like, “You don’t decide if it’s perfect; your socials do. It’s definitely & objectively on you, if it’s late.” I would rather set my own standards rather than be distracted by an audience. If I need to get the message out, I can always work with an influencer.

Some might say, “You’re leaving money on the table.” Honestly, only new apps like TikTok are leaving money on the table since it’s where exponential growth is without an algorithm gimping you.

Others might say, “You seriously do not get that people want it now.” This is perhaps the most valid concern. We live in a 24/7 news cycle and the value of an image drops precipitously the further in time it is to the newsworthy event. Sure there are still long form, photo essays, but the money is either in breaking the news or a book. I would say that having habitually been “late to the party,” there is still room for stories that cover in a deep and thoughtful way, the aftermath.

What’s your photographic process? Is print first like I’m doing the way to go? Let me know in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.

Lately, I’ve been walking around looking for moments of emotion in my street photography. One time on Montgomery Street while shooting with Matt Sanchez a couple listening to someone with a sagacious, feminine tone of voice. I turned and could see them smiling and lunged like a fencer so that I was in front of them no more than a yard. I snapped a photo.

This photo was shot with a 28mm & Ilford HP5+ and you can see my shadow. With a bit of cropping you got a couple happy at getting some good news. Most critique groups automatically discount smiley faces but I love them. Why?

It’s more important to shoot what you feel than what you see, because ultimately what people remember about your photo is how you made them feel. Emotional memory is the secret to making memorable photo.

Sunbathing Bliss, San Francisco, 2019, Leica M3, 50mm Summicron, f/11, 1/1000

What are the limits of expressing thoughts in Twitter?

Here’s a powerful but inefficient (when run) thought that can be expressed on Twitter, a quick sort in Erlang in 126 characters.

qsort([]) -> [];
qsort([Pivot|T]) ->
   qsort([X || X <- T, X < Pivot])
   ++ [Pivot] ++
   qsort([X || X <- T, X >= Pivot]).

Also strcmp implemented in C can be tweeted:

int bstrcmp(char *s1,char *s2) { while(*s1 == *s2++) {if(*s1++ == 0){return 0;} } 
return (*(unsigned char *)s1 - *(unsigned char*)--s2);}

A lot of Perl one-liners can fit into a tweet – powerful and useful ones.

You can also propose the concept of a hash tag in a tweet:

However, there are many thoughts that seem to be difficult to fit into a tweet:

The Pythagorean Theorem and one of its many proofs
Anselm’s Ontological Proof for God’s Existence
Merge Sort in Ruby
Merge Sort in PHP
Why you should or shouldn’t outsource
What qualities make a great tech hire
The logical fallacy in another person’s tweet
How to subtly tell someone something in an indirect way with the only others knowing being those in the know

Twitter encourages the laconic expression of thought.

NOTE: If you are reading this in May 2017, this was written in January 2017. I now have a decent crew of folks to shoot with, and am not using any marketing on my account anymore.

Instagram punishes users for experimentation unless it’s through its stories. Basically when you create an account the more photos you add, the more locked into an audience and style you get. If you deviate from that style, like I did for two weeks in 2015, you can lose 25% of your followers. The right response to this is to-heck with those followers. A more thought out response is why doesn’t Instagram just send users that would like the change your way?

After experimenting with street photography for two weeks, I went back to the old style of landscapes that I used to post. It’s interesting to note that at this time, Instagram was really freaked out about Snapchat, who rebuffed a $3 billion dollar offer from Facebook. People were posting less and less on Instagram. “It became a place where people kept raising the bar on themselves in terms of the quality of what they had to achieve to post,” says Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, “We didn’t want that.”

I changed my style because after a nasty fall doing photography in the rain, street photography reflected the broken-ness that I was feeling. I wasn’t only broken physically but broken in other realms of my life. I had and still have a long standing feud with a photo stealer currently running a huge community hub. This person abuses the position and the prestige as a community manager for personal gain – the Donald Trump of the photo world that threatens people that call out photo theft with police action.

Demoralized, I had nowhere to turn. Nobody wanted to shoot with me back in 2015, and it’s 2017 and I still have a ridiculously hard time finding people to shoot with. Maybe I should just isolate myself and focus on my art. Maybe life’s different at 20,000 followers I thought. Maybe it’s worth doing anything I could to get there, and my life would be different?

In August of 2016, I set about learning everything I could about marketing my Instagram account. I found an Instagram knowledge-base of sorts in Liz Dean’s InstaRevealed marketing Facebook group. Instarevealed is just one of many businesses promising account growth, and to be honest, she delivers. You basically are funneled into following their IG account, and join a Facebook group where folks share their success stories on reaching 1k, 5k, 10k followers and up. You can join a “comment pod” which has a bunch of guidelines. Comment pods are for folks like me that got betrayed by their crew, got dropped by other IGers, or never had anybody to shoot with in the first place. They grow your likes by making sure 14 people comment on your post within 15 minutes so that it grows. They are also for the shadiest people I’ve ever met on a social networking app.

Here are the motley types you will find:

1) The diva of awful photographs, who so believes they’re entitled or owed 100,000 followers, and all they shoot are pixelated, blurry photographs of the worst sort. This person will bitch in the group about not getting enough likes or that the algorithm is somehow biased against them. I’ve cursed this person out with, “Why don’t you level up your photography?”

2) The person that you thought grew their following authentically but never did. After reading this article you’ll be able to tell which of your Instagram heroes aren’t heroes at all. You’ll see them saying shots are killer for the 14 or so folks per pod that they are in that have the crappiest photos, or the photos might be decent but their comments’ enthusiasm in no way matches the photo. A photo of Grandma’s Grave will get “Killer shot dude! Lit!”

3) The photo stealer is someone in your pod who just posts photos by other people. The way they explain it is that by using purely viral photos from other people they can grow their account the quickest. This is absolutely true, and it seems Instagram HQ doesn’t care about fixing this except for a broken DMCA process.

4) Real friends. Yeah, this sort of surprised me but I met a bunch of folks that I’d actually want to hang out with.

5) Oh, and there’s me. A person who used to run a San Francisco community account, gave it to a bunch of folks to run, and got back-stabbed by them. This person was bent on some sort of way for getting justice from this but realized their ruined and sad lives were justice enough. Occasionally reporting stolen photos to Instagram and having Instagram take them down is enough.

So comment pods will get you likes, but to grow followers at a rate of 5000 or so a month, you need to do something different. I signed an NDA and so can’t go into what this is. Let’s just say I did this for 6 months, and at 20,000 followers still find myself shooting alone. There’s an automated way of doing this where you can just set it and forget it. There’s the manual way of doing this, where folks will spend 8 or more hours a day blowing up their accounts. It was truly sad seeing people game Instagram for 8 hours a day or more when they could actually just learn a bit of photography, photo editing and web development.

I decided to stop growing my account because I felt, “Hey, this is where I’d probably end up if I did become a suggested user.” I also stopped because lots of folks started spreading the false rumor that I was buying followers. Marketing for follows, and buying them aren’t the same in my book.

What I want to do now has nothing to do with marketing. Instead, I’d rather just go back to using my account the way I used to – posting whatever I want and connecting with whomever I want. Also, I want to focus on creating a photography book. After that, I eventually want to create an app, because owning your own social networking / photography app:
“It’s like a final club. Except we’re president.”