I came a across a great article on Wired-Raw File. called Photographers: Chances are you suck. It is an original post by Kenneth Jarecke. He is not a photographer that I had ever heard of before but I liked what he had to say about his craft and the notion of the internet and available tools making everyone equals.
“Chances are, you suck. Worse yet, nobody is going to tell you…..”
As it turns out I was talking about this just last night at the Todcast Night at Burley Oak ( Blatant self promotion ). Most good artists, not just photographers, that I know are bad self promoters. Unfortunately there are a lot of great self promoters that are bad artists. (Admittedly, I may fall in the later category.) I’ve been called an opportunist, wanna-be socialite and just plain “not cool” for all my efforts with Good Clean Fun. I disagree with all these negative assessments but I, like Kenneth, think it is important to know your strengths and weaknesses.
“……..There are plenty of things photography-wise that I’m not very good at. I’m not great at creating images, but I’m pretty good at finding them. I’m terrible at self-promoting, marketing and the business stuff makes me squirm. Yet I’m a decent journalist, travel well and strangers often accept me into their lives. (Maybe I’ve got one of those faces)……”
But I think a fair assessment is that we, at Good Clean Fun fall somewhere in the middle of good artist and good self promoter ( which means we are as close to being bad Artist and bad self promoters)
So I would encourage you, as a fan, reader, or hater to offer some constructive (not mean spirited) critiques of our site, our pictures, or our blog posts. Note that I am inevitably called a twit by my newspaper editor friend whenever I ask her to read my writing.
“…..This isn’t like teaching a child to read. Positive reinforcement is your enemy. Your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers … hate you. Instead of taking 10 seconds to say, “This doesn’t work. You need to do better,” they readily push that “like” button because it’s easy and they hope to get the same from you. But also because they’re cowards…..”
For the whole article Click here