The trouble with photoSig.
photoSig is a great place. You open an account, post up your images and the get critiques on how you could improve your shots. There are some outstanding photographers there, so you can view their work and see what comments other people made. At face value it all works as planned, there are some things that I find troubling though.
The first issue is with crit police “CP”. There are a number of individuals who have decided that there should be a ratio of 3 critiques to 1 photo post. If you don’t meet that requirement they will post a negative critique (or a comment) telling you that they won’t critique you and you should post more critiques. Now, I have had some critiques posted to my images by people who wanted to get their crit ratio up but clearly didn’t know their ISO from their f-stop and barely bothered to look at the image at all. So their “critiques” were pointless. Thus trouble 1 is that the system encourages those who know nothing to make useless observations. There is also a trivial way to deal with the CP, make a bunch of critiques, then delete your images periodically to maintain your ratio. This however is frowned upon, because deleting an image also deletes the critiques from it and thus the crit ratio of the posters goes down. Hence, if everyone deleted all but a few of their images, practically no one would be able to maintain their crit ratio. Personally I choose to delete my old images, not to maintain my crit ratio (although it helps), but because I don’t want my old images out there when I have new, hopefully better ones, to show.
The second issue is directly tied into nudes. The site makes big that it’s about photography BUT that’s a half truth. I have a suspicion that most of the people who crit nudes don’t look at them because of the composition and lighting but because they want to see some young tits-n-ass. Take my last 3 nudes, of the critiques received 5 posters had a least 1 nude in their portfolio while 12 didn’t have anything remotely like studio work or nudes (landscapes, snapshots of the kids, birds, etc). Now while I appreciate that everyone has an opinion how can someone who doesn’t shoot nudes and doesn’t use a studio honestly give me advice of how to improve my studio technique. It’s nice to get a good rating but the point of posting is supposed to be to learn. The critiques often are meaningless as well.
I posted two similar images but the models were of different ages,
one of Siren Song and one of Cheeky Lee.
The pose is similar and the lighting is almost the same. No prizes for guessing that the one of Lee got a much higher rating and more views than Siren Song. This I feel is the main flaw in the photoSig site. Ultimately, I feel they are critiquing the model and not the photo. Both women are beautiful, just one is a bit younger than the other.
The last issue I have is with the comments some people make.
“Nudes look better if their nipples are perky to stand out more!”
“I don’t like nipple rings! It would be better if she didn’t have a nipple ring!”
“I don’t like tattoos! It would be better if she didn’t have tattoos!”
“It would be better with a younger model”
“You shouldn’t use side lighting and dark shadows, more even front lighting would be more glamorous!”
How can you make a comment on a photograph that basically says that it would have been better if you photographed something different.
OMG this turned into bit of a rant!
Not everything is bad though. When I started posting to photoSig I set one of my goals as to having an image on the front page. This week I did it with the image of Lee. So thank you Lee, and thank you all those who gave the photo of Lee a high rating. Although I am assuming that they were rating my photo and not just the drool factor of Lee.
The first issue is with crit police “CP”. There are a number of individuals who have decided that there should be a ratio of 3 critiques to 1 photo post. If you don’t meet that requirement they will post a negative critique (or a comment) telling you that they won’t critique you and you should post more critiques. Now, I have had some critiques posted to my images by people who wanted to get their crit ratio up but clearly didn’t know their ISO from their f-stop and barely bothered to look at the image at all. So their “critiques” were pointless. Thus trouble 1 is that the system encourages those who know nothing to make useless observations. There is also a trivial way to deal with the CP, make a bunch of critiques, then delete your images periodically to maintain your ratio. This however is frowned upon, because deleting an image also deletes the critiques from it and thus the crit ratio of the posters goes down. Hence, if everyone deleted all but a few of their images, practically no one would be able to maintain their crit ratio. Personally I choose to delete my old images, not to maintain my crit ratio (although it helps), but because I don’t want my old images out there when I have new, hopefully better ones, to show.
The second issue is directly tied into nudes. The site makes big that it’s about photography BUT that’s a half truth. I have a suspicion that most of the people who crit nudes don’t look at them because of the composition and lighting but because they want to see some young tits-n-ass. Take my last 3 nudes, of the critiques received 5 posters had a least 1 nude in their portfolio while 12 didn’t have anything remotely like studio work or nudes (landscapes, snapshots of the kids, birds, etc). Now while I appreciate that everyone has an opinion how can someone who doesn’t shoot nudes and doesn’t use a studio honestly give me advice of how to improve my studio technique. It’s nice to get a good rating but the point of posting is supposed to be to learn. The critiques often are meaningless as well.
I posted two similar images but the models were of different ages,
one of Siren Song and one of Cheeky Lee.
The pose is similar and the lighting is almost the same. No prizes for guessing that the one of Lee got a much higher rating and more views than Siren Song. This I feel is the main flaw in the photoSig site. Ultimately, I feel they are critiquing the model and not the photo. Both women are beautiful, just one is a bit younger than the other.
The last issue I have is with the comments some people make.
“Nudes look better if their nipples are perky to stand out more!”
“I don’t like nipple rings! It would be better if she didn’t have a nipple ring!”
“I don’t like tattoos! It would be better if she didn’t have tattoos!”
“It would be better with a younger model”
“You shouldn’t use side lighting and dark shadows, more even front lighting would be more glamorous!”
How can you make a comment on a photograph that basically says that it would have been better if you photographed something different.
OMG this turned into bit of a rant!
Not everything is bad though. When I started posting to photoSig I set one of my goals as to having an image on the front page. This week I did it with the image of Lee. So thank you Lee, and thank you all those who gave the photo of Lee a high rating. Although I am assuming that they were rating my photo and not just the drool factor of Lee.
posted by Richard at 4:09 PM
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