Final Written Response

For me, keeping a photo-blog is difficult. A while back, I started a normal blog and it was incredibly hard for me to keep up. This is because it takes so much effort to sit down at your computer, log in, and get on the site, and for me, by that time I don’t even want to blog. A similar situation happened with me for this photo-blog. It’s not that I don’t want people to see my images, it’s that it takes so much to get my photograph on the website. But, if I were to publicly display my images on the Internet, I would rather use a website, and update the gallery/site whenever I have new material. That way I don’t feel forced to take a shoot every single day.

This blog didn’t change my idea about the photographic process at all. The images I put on my blog I had taken for other assignments or outtakes from shoots. I wanted people to get a feel for my style and I feel that my audience can only get that from seeing shots that I took specifically in that way. However, I did find this assignment an intriguing idea because it showed our class that there are other ways of publicly displaying your work, via Internet. I feel like it’s important to learn about a large variety of way to display or publish one’s photographs.

This blog, to me, besides being an assignment, was a place to show strong images I’ve taken and also to show how I got to those photographs via work-in-progress type photographs (photos from different shoots, different approaches etc). I will admit that even though I looked at other people’s blogs, I never actually commented on any of them and I never started discussion. Nor did I post articles or discuss what I was going for in a certain image/shoot. To me, this place is a visual space to analyze my classmates’ work.

In the future I’m going to keep my blog, just because it’s a simple way for showing a large number of people my work. However, I don’t think I’ll be keeping it extremely up-to-date. This is simply because I have more important things I’d rather be doing than posting photos onto my blog. I feel like someone who really appreciates constructive criticism would benefit more from this assignment. That’s not to say that I don’t care what people have to say about my images, I welcome constructive criticism with open arms, I just know I would rather shoot something completely new than go back and re-shoot the same thing.

The biggest limitation that I feel a blog has on photography is the fact that the photograph is being compressed and the image looks significantly more terrible on the actual blog as opposed to viewing the image at full size and full resolution. At least with printing an image, you can preserve the resolution and certain details. The images on the physical blog are suffering from gamut compression (yay for M&P), which annoys me to the extent I don’t even want to upload an image.

Overall, I feel like this assignment was very creative and innovative. I feel like some people could really benefit having a place to publicly put their work and obtain feedback. I also believe that the blog helps people view their work-in-progress and it could potentially help them construct their final image or images. However, I feel this assignment was very specific to these types of people. For someone who would rather print their images and work off of physical documentation of their photographs would have a hard time improving an image with the blog. Also, for people who have a hard time keeping a routine, it would be hard for those types of people to keep up-to-date and they might even forget about it completely. But, I feel like we needed a completely different kind of assignment and even though I would have rather had something different, I do feel the blog fulfilled it’s purpose quite well.