©Mark Hulbert

Twitter has developed into my first stop when I’m looking for the most current chatter.  It’s kind of like the town square, corner bar and water cooler are rolled into one.  When anyone criticizes Twitter by saying “why do I care what you had for lunch?,” I don’t take them seriously because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

I have Twitter accounts for the blogs I run, including LPV, and then my personal account.

Conversational RSS Feed

One of the most annoying and misguided criticisms of Twitter is that it’s all about meaningless chitchat. In reality, Twitter is used by a high percentage of people the share content.  Almost every major media organization and most prolific bloggers use Twitter to distribute their content.  This has lead some people to call it the ‘conversational RSS.’  I get plenty of photography news by simply following Twitter feeds.  With Twitter lists, I have these segmented, and by using a tool like Hootsuite, it becomes easy to organize these lists.

Mixed in with the links is the conversations that revolves around them.  It’s not necessarily the best platform for in depth conversations but it’s great for a quick comment.  The 140 character limit forces you to get to the point. Beyond the sharing of links and the conversations around them, you also get general conversation about your niche.  Twitter is good for throwing out questions to get a quick idea of what people think, or generally just ruminating on a subject.

Todd Walker and Harlan Erskine have used Twitter to conduct chats about photography.  These can be hard to follow, unless you use third party tools, which is another great thing about Twitter. Most people don’t directly interact on Twitter. They mostly use third party clients like Hootsuite, TweetDeck and many others.

I primarily use the LPV Twitter to aggregate and distribute interesting photography links and stories I find, along with distributing our own content as well.  We gain new followers every day and I tend to keep an eye on whose following and have on a few occasions found new photographers I find interesting.  I really can’t imagine any photography blogger worth their salt not utilizing Twitter to distribute their content. Why would you not provide your audience with another way of accessing your content?  Of course, there are some bloggers who are hung up on the bookmark paradigm, but they’re few and far between these days, and typically have a self-inflated view of their value.

Photographers on Twitter

I’m starting to see more and more photographers using Twitter. Certainly much of the use right now is purely self-promotion.  But my favorites are the photographers that provide insight into their day to day process and relationship with photography.  Is this information vital to understanding their work? No, probably not.  But knowing more about the photographer changes the way I perceive the work.  I have more to say about this but don’t want to get derailed, so I’ll have to save that for a future post.

Something you don’t see as much, but I think is interesting, is when photographers use Twitter from the field.  Sometimes you’ll see cellphone pix from location, or comments about the location, and or conditions.  In fact, there are people I know who are uploading cellphone pix almost all day. Again, this won’t appeal to everyone, but for me, it’s another  way to get to know more about the photographer and their work.

Some photographers won’t be comfortable with Twitter simply because they’re not verbally oriented. I understand this, and there’s always the risk that you could alienate your audience as well by being inarticulate, or boring.  But I tend to think the character limit actually works to the benefit of photographers who don’t like to say much.

Does a photographer need to be on Twitter? No, of course not. But it is a relatively quick and easy way to engage and stay connected to what’s going in your niche.  And I’m fairly certain Twitter has become plumbing and will probably be with us for a long time, so down the road, I’m guessing most photographers who are pursuing a career or an audience will eventually have some sort of a presence.

One final note, Twitter is more about sharing content and ideas than making witty comments, so don’t be fooled by those that dismiss it as useless chatter. The evidence is in. Twitter has proven to be a remarkable tool for connecting and sharing.

If you’re interested in getting started, here are two list that might help.

twitter.com/lpvgallery/photomedia
twitter.com/lpvgallery/photographers

What kind of Twitterer is LPV?

According to Klout: @lpvgallery is a Specialist

You may not be a celebrity, but within your area of expertise your opinion is second to none. Your content is likely focused around a specific topic or industry with a focused, highly-engaged audience.

Photograph©Delaney Allen

I was fortunate enough to find a group of people on Flickr who were passionate about the history of the medium and were willing to share their knowledge.  I suspect my experience is probably not the norm.  Through the street photography group, HCSP, I received book suggestions, tips from more experience photographers, and mostly importantly I was able to connect with several other photographers at the same stage as me.

So my first impressions of Flickr were that it was more than a place to share photographs, it was a place to learn from my peers. However, it didn’t take long for me to learn about general impression about the site, which is that it’s filled with amateur garbage which makes it impossible to find any meaningful work.  This is certainly true to some extent.

Why would any photographer use Flickr?  As with all social media, before you can answer that, you should probably have a well thought out answer about your objectives for your photography.

If you went to art school and have an MFA in photography, there’s probably no point in using Flickr. I would suspect your ambitions are for a career in fine art photography, which means building an audience online isn’t that important. What’s important is the networking, the portfolio reviews and ultimately getting your work in front of influential curators and collectors.  I doubt building an audience on Flickr will help you achieve those goals. You’re far better off with a polished blog, and strategically connecting with influential bloggers.

Now, if you didn’t go to art school and have no formal photography training, then Flickr is worth considering.  If you know what genre(s) of photography, you’re interested in, you can find groups dedicated them and begin to network.  What’s important and crucial with Flickr is that you only really receive the benefits if you give as much as you receive.  You need to actively interested in your peers.  Sure, there are some photographers who are a cut about the rest and will draw attention irregardless of their networking skill, but in general, you’ll have a much more rewarding experience if you dive in and connect with other photographers.

This was my objective. Flickr was the easiest place for me to find like minded photographers who might appreciate my work.  And since I was learning, I became an image junkie and would spend hours and hours looking at the work of others.  Not to mention all the time I spent in the HCSP forum participating and sharing what I was learning.

This strikes me as a common sense approach but I could be wrong.  And I think by now, it’s also pretty much common sense that you shouldn’t use Flickr as a portfolio site, so I won’t even get into that.

But what about those that don’t have time to look at everyone’s work, but are still interested in finding interesting new work?

Managing the Flood of Photographs

Presentation and organization are not two of Flickr’s strengths.  And really, to enjoy Flickr you have to be somewhat inclined to browse around and go through a certain amount of photographs.  If you just want the good stuff without doing a bit of work, then you’ll probably get frustrated and not find much value.

The first place to look for edited photographs is in Groups which are dedicated to every conceivable genre and topic. It really varies by group how much editing they do, but I prefer groups that create a balance between selectivity and a consistently new photographs.  Unfortunately, too many groups just let everything into the pool which makes them pretty much impossible to sort through. I won’t name names, but this is the case for many online blogs and publications that use Flickr for submissions.

Here are the groups that I frequent. You might not share the same sensibility, which is understandable.

HCSP (Street Photography)
Contract Killers (Portraits)
Two For the Road
la familia abrazada (Family and Friends)

I left LPV off the list because we use it for a different purpose, which I’ll get to later.

And then there’s Photographs on the Brain, which is sort of an experiment.  I started it as a place to invite only the best of the best that I found on Flickr, but I soon invited some of my friends who shared a similar sensibility as me to invite photographs as well. Right now we have 100 editors inviting to the pool. Not all are very active, but this collective inviting is one way that you can use the power of the network to build an interesting pool of photographs.  Because you see, it’s impossible to really keep tabs on what’s going on so you might as well rely on your friends.

Which brings me to ‘Favorites,’ another shortcut to finding interesting work. A favorite is basically a users collection of photographs they’ve bookmarked.

If you find someone active on Flickr like me, you can dip into their Favorites and immediately find the work they find interesting. This will lead you to photographers you can add as contacts to follow.  Often times if I’m looking for new work, I’ll browse through people’s favorites. In fact that’s probably my preferred method of looking at Flickr these days.  You can pull the RSS feed for anyone’s favorites, so I have a folder in Google Reader set up specifically to follow certain people’s favorites.

The Publishing Perspective

This site and blog wouldn’t exist without Flickr.  It’s where we find most of the photographs and photographers we feature.  From the beginning, we used our group pool a bit differently. Since we decided to do monthly shows, we basically gave up on having a continuos pool of photographs.  After each monthly show, the pool would be cleared for the next month.

Flickr makes it insanely easy to submit photographs. The drawback of course, is that you have to moderate and edit those submissions.  One example of an established online magazine using Flickr to add to their content is Fraction Magazine.  They’ve been using Flickr for their One Picture Look feature, which I think is an interesting value add to their regular issues.

Something I’ve learned about social media is that you shouldn’t underestimate people’s habits.  When I started this blog, I created a thread on our Flickr group for links to all the blog posts and soon noticed that a high number of people came to the blog through those links.  Some people just don’t want to leave Flickr.  Point being, go where your audience is and make it easy for them to find your content.

Final Thoughts

I’m at the point now where I ignore absolute statements about Flickr.  Like any platform, it has its advantages and disadvantages. What’s important are your objectives and how you use the tool. With Flickr, there’s no question you have a large concentration of people who are passionately interested in photography, all kinds of photography.  I find it hard to believe that if you’re trying to build an audience either as a photographer or publisher that this wouldn’t be of interest to you to some degree.

For me, as a photographer and editor, I find Flickr to be a diverse and interesting community, a place where I’ve met most of my photography friends and discovered photography that inspires me and makes me think everyday.  I think the biggest mistake one can make is to disregard a large, diverse, passionate community.  Amongst the photography masses on Flickr, there are pockets of highly intelligent, informed, studious photographers who aren’t concerned about contests, prizes, book deals or being promoted on blogs or zines.  They’re simply passionate about photography, and for me, that’s what it’s all about.

(Note: If you have any questions about Flickr, I’m happy to give you my thoughts. Either through Facebook, Twitter, or email)