exo : blah

If one is to believe the internets then Flickr is doomed, going downhill and just not the place to share photos anymore. Given this I thought I'd go and try something else. In this case 500px which has a reputation as a serious photography site.

So, it looks quite nice, although the gap to Flickr isn't what it was, and at first glance it is indeed full of serious photographs. Very serious and mostly very boring.

What's lovely about Flickr is, and this may be less true than it once was, it has personality. There is quirk and frivolity to it and that quirk is relatively easy to find via groups. One of the reasons I look at photos is to see things that are novel and different, odd perspectives and unusual subjects, photographs that make me think about how I look at the world and what I point a camera at. Endless shots of lovely landscapes, long exposure rivers and beaches, macro flowers and insects and a dozen other cliches are not what I'm looking for. These are what 500px mostly surfaces and I just glaze over.

I did hack out a few 'things against a starfield' photos as a result of 500px which was a worthwhile exercise but even there so many largely indistinguishable photos of trees or mountains with the milky way across the sky. Technically impressive but constant exposure to them dulls the effect.

And how much HDR? I am clearly in some sort of minority here but HDR does nothing for me and 500px is rife with it. Terrible, awful, hyperrealism style images with all the colours dialled up to eleven.

500px is worthwhile in that it's a window into what a chunk of people like and I see styles and types of photos I'd otherwise not choose to see but as a source of inspiration it's a bit of a dud.

The reason I find Flickr more useful as a source of the unusual are groups which helpfully segment the firehose into self selecting areas of interest. There's plenty of groups on Flickr that have the same sort of thing as 500px but the sheer number of them results in little niches, often with strong selection policies which ensures a consistency of vision to them. A consistency of quirk and the resulting inspiration.