The reason I am researching different ways to get feedback, this is because I need to know what I did right and what I need to improve. Does my research that I have done about different aspects of photography reflect on my final 30 photos? I have decided to look at multiple different ways because I need a couple of websites to upload my images too. I can’t just upload 30 photos to a website and expect them to all get a decent amount of feedback. If I share the 30 photos across a couple of websites, I am more likely to get feedback.
ARS
The first platform that I found that allows you to give criticism and feedback and also receive criticism. It is also a very easy website to use, you just make a profile and then upload the photos that you want feedback on, and then you just wait for the feedback.
Also when you give feedback it is completely anonymous so you don’t have to worry about receiving any hate for the harsh feedback you might have given. The fact that this website is very easy to join because it is a public website and it is free, this increases the chances of trolls joining the website and not giving helpful feedback or no feedback at all. Also because it is anonymous when you post, the people leaving these useless comments don’t care because they don’t know who they are This website is made by a photographer for photographers because this website isn’t as popular as other photography feedback website, the small number of people are more likely to be really into photography looking to help and give feedback on other people work.
Aldred, J. (2019). There is now a website that lets you get (and give!) honest feedback on photographs. [online] DIY Photography. Available at: https://www.diyphotography.net/there-is-now-a-website-that-lets-you-get-and-give-honest-feedback-on-photographs/ [Accessed 20 May. 2019].
DPReview. (2019). ARS is a new online platform for honest, anonymous photo critiques. [online] Available at: https://www.dpreview.com/news/5774607830/ars-anonymous-photo-rating-platform-offers-photographers-honest-feedback [Accessed 20 May. 2019].
Flickr
Flickr is an image sharing platform, it is similar to Instagram but it is used and based for photographers who are looking for a more serious platform to upload their photos too and get feedback. You can gather feedback by just uploading photos to your gallery but a better way to gather feedback is to join groups that are meant for people to give and receive feedback on their photos.
Two of the most popular groups on Flickr that are dedicated to giving feedback. The most popular critique group of Flickr is called ‘Photography Critique’, this group had 18,824 members and growing. The reality is that most of the people are not active anymore or just don’t choose to give feedback but there is still a lot of people giving feedback. On this group, 6K photos have been uploaded, so that means 37 thousand images have been uploaded, looking for feedback. So there are lots of other people looking for feedback on their photos. Discussions I post that you write that gives people insight about the shot and what feedback you need.
Looking at the discussions in the ‘Photography Critique’, I can see that there are lots of posts posted in the last couple of days. Some post from 3 hours ago have more replies from posts from 3 days ago, I don’t know why this is but I am thinking it might be random. Another thing that might affect the engagement rate of your post in the title. There are lots of posts but that is not necessarily a good thing because the more posts there are, the less chance of people picking yours.
Another popular group is ‘Critique, this group doesn’t have as many members as the previous but 9,476 people is still a lot of a group. This group has 37.4K photos uploaded and 16,705 discussions.
Looking at the discussions on the ‘Critique’ group I can see that there are fewer posts posted daily. There’s a range of 1-4 discussions posted a day, that means that there are fewer posts to look through, so there is a higher chance of someone commenting on my post and giving me feedback. Also, these posts get a lot of replies as well, one post from 1 day ago has 19 replies and a post from 7 days ago has 21 replies. This means that there are plenty of people looking to give feedback on your photos.
Geuss, M. (2019). How and where to get feedback on your photos. [online] Macworld. Available at: https://www.macworld.com/article/1161689/how_and_where_to_get_feedback_on_your_photos.html [Accessed 20 May. 2019].
Photo.net
Photo.net is a forum that is dedicating for helping people improve their photography skill by writing articles and by giving feedback. This website isn’t as popular as other photography platforms but it is still a good place to receive feedback. The fact that it is smaller could be looked like a good thing because there are fewer people posting so more people should see your posts and comment on them. Photo.net has also been around for a long time, it was created in 1993 so it had been around for 26 years. Some of the people have been around since the start, this is good because over the years these people have been dedicated to giving feedback on people work.
Since 1993, photo.net has 61,887,737,655 impressions this means how many people who have visited the website over the last 26 years. 12,377,547,531 views on every post ever on the website. 8,675,469 is the amount of every comment on the website, also 2,742,066 people have liked the post. 287,201 people have favorited people images. 5,143,780 photos have been uploaded to Photo.net. If a divide the number of comments by the number of photos posted you get 1.68, so on average, the number of comments on one post is around 1-2. It’s obvious that posts have more than 1-2 comments.
The forum that focusing on feedback on people photos is called ‘Seeking Critique’, you can see by the numbers of discussions and messages that it isn’t as popular as the ‘No Words’ with 30,301 discussions and 511,776 messages. But from looking at the replies on the post, the fact that there aren’t as many posts is a good thing. It is also better that it is a smaller forum because there are them dedicated few that want to help by giving feedback.
Looking at the recent posts, I can see that all of the posts posted, get a decent amount of feedback. Posts from less than a week ago have 7,12,16 replies. These replies are full of feedback from people who know what they are talking about and are experienced with giving feedback. This is a better website to receive feedback rather than a platform like Instagram, a lot of the people who give feedback are not qualified to do so, and the feedback they do give is not helpful. A lot of the feedback you get on Instagram are small comments like ‘Nice pic’ or ‘great work’, these comments are nice but they are not feedback. They’re not telling me what is good about the photo and what I need to improve.
Geuss, M. (2019). How and where to get feedback on your photos. [online] Macworld. Available at: https://www.macworld.com/article/1161689/how_and_where_to_get_feedback_on_your_photos.html [Accessed 20 May. 2019].
Reddit is a forum, it is a place where you can post stuff. Reddit is broken up into lots of different groups, also known as ‘Subreddits’. There are more than a million of this subreddit, each one of these focuses and is dedicated to different things. Each on these subreddits has there communities that are interested in what it is about. There are subreddits from gaming to sports, fitness to science, and also the subreddit I am interested in, the r/PhotoCritique.
MakeUseOf. (2019). 8 Places to Get Feedback on Your Photos. [online] Available at: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-places-get-feedback-photos/ [Accessed 20 May. 2019].
The r/photocritique subreddit has 476k member, some of these people are just waiting for you to post so they can leave honest feedback. Looking at the bio of this subreddit, I can see that this is the group that I want and need to join to get feedback on my images. The bio basically says that this group is full of passionate photographers and their main goal of this subreddit is to help all photographers by giving them helpful honest feedback.
Reddit.com. (2019). Photo Critique. [online] Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/photocritique/ [Accessed 20 May. 2019].
The layout of a subreddit is really simple, all of the posts have an upvote and downvote system. If you have a high amount of upvotes your images is going to be close to the top, so when someone goes on this subreddit they are likely to see your post. If your post gets downvoted your post goes down the feed so there is a less chance that people are going to see your post. Looking at the comments on these two examples you can see that there are a good amount of comments for being posted less than a day ago. The comment on these post are detailed and give helpful criticism.
Google Form
Google Forms is an app that is part of google drive, forms allow you to create surveys and send them to people to answer the question you set. This is a good way of gathering feedback because you can send it to anyone at any time. This is especially good for me because I am at in a room full of people who are in my target audience, all I need to do is send it to their address and they can start filling it out.
En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Google Forms. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Forms [Accessed 20 May. 2019].
It is very easy to make a survey, there are different kinds of question you can ask, this is good because you can choose how they answer. I multiple choice question would be for I question that has straight forwards answered like Yes or No, eg, do you like this photo. I checkboxes format is good more choosing questions like, what five photos do you like out of these 10 photos. Short and Paragraph format question is very good for getting feedback, an example question is, what do you like about this photo and what would you improve.
When you have finished creating the survey, you select the people you want to receive the survey. You add the subject of the survey so people know what it is about before they open it, you can also add a small message as well.
When people have filled in the survey you can check the responses, the responses are visualized in very easy to follow formats. This makes it easy to see the percentage of the people who selected that answer.
Photography FMP 