Photography and Social Media

On Moodle, one of class wondered about how social media could help her with her photography interest/business.

Photography and Social Media have been strongly linked for a very long time. One of the earliest true social media communities I can think of is Photo.net. Photo.net started waaaaaaay back in 1993, and is a forum for photographers and those interested in photography.

There are a number of photo sharing platforms out there, including Picasa and arguably the most dominant photo platform, Flickr.

Flickr can be used any number of ways to not only share images, but to build discussions and communities around them. To see how one person uses Flickr for their photography, check out the Flickr page of Portland-based photographer Zeb Andrews

Zeb posts a new photo about once a day, writing a few paragraphs to go with each. He basically uses Flickr as a photo-blog platform, and as a result has built a following for his photography. He now has 1,554 people following him on Flickr!

Like most social media, a successful use of it uses more than one platform. Zeb recently branched out and used another social site called Kickstarter. This site is a kind-of microfinance site where people can post a proposal for a project they want to do, and an amount of money they need to raise to do it. Individuals can join Kickstarter and choose to pledge money towards any project they like. If the project reaches its funding goal within 40 days, then the pledge is charged, and if the goal is not reached, no money changes hands.

Zeb, who has been working on a series of photos of Portland's bridges, put up a project to turn his series into a gallery exhibit and a book. He placed this on Kickstarter and was fully funded within a few weeks, and actually ended up raising nearly double what he needed!

There are many other ways that social media can be harnessed for photography, from joining photo sites to see what others are doing (and share one's own work) to raising money to reading about photography and sharing ideas.