Do people have photoblogs anymore?

[mconnealy]

I imagine a lot of the early bloggers like me developed an interest in photography in the era of the big photo magazines like Life. That experience formed my idea of photography as a story telling art with pictures and words working together. I worked at that for quite a while, getting a few stories in newspapers and one shot published in Life, but I really didn't have a clue about creating a money-making career of it. The appearance of the Internet and the opportunity for self-publishing being fully under my own control seemed a marvelous development to me. Still does.

 

[sem]

I use my blog like a diary. As grow older the posts become fewer. A good opportunity to remember.
If you like to take a look: 6x6-light-leaks
Best sem

 

[agentlossing]

Blogging is supposed to be personal - a labor of love, as @DownUnder said. Visitors can decide for themselves whether it adds value to them or not, unlike social media platforms, which will be serving you content whether you like it or not, and no matter how many times you suppress the content you don't care about, it'll be served to you again. Regardless of the underlying blog serving sites or whatever layer is there which keeps things from being truly free and independent, it still keeps control over content in the hands of the user, and that's what I care about. It's what I remembered from the internet pre-Facebook, and what made it seem like a truly limitless world of potential. Now, between social media and the way Google and other search engines prioritize the results they show you (and omit thousands of other results altogether), you really can't get that kind of experience. It has paradoxically made the internet start to feel much smaller and less valuable.

 

[p.giannakis]

I imagine a lot of the early bloggers like me developed an interest in photography in the era of the big photo magazines like Life. That experience formed my idea of photography as a story telling art with pictures and words working together.

Very true !

 

[JoeV]

I imagine a lot of the early bloggers like me developed an interest in photography in the era of the big photo magazines like Life. That experience formed my idea of photography as a story telling art with pictures and words working together. I worked at that for quite a while, getting a few stories in newspapers and one shot published in Life, but I really didn't have a clue about creating a money-making career of it. The appearance of the Internet and the opportunity for self-publishing being fully under my own control seemed a marvelous development to me. Still does.

Mike, I always like reading your blog and appreciate your consistency. Here’s a link for those interested: Photography & Vintage Film Cameras

 

[DownUnder]

The internet destroyed once-lucrative photo markets - stock images come to my mind as I was seriously into that in the '80s and '90s - by flooding the world with digicrap photos posted by desperate amateurs ready and willing to even donate pints of their blood to get any of their work published. As for being paid for same, forget it. Giveaways have also destroyed most of the once-lucrative publishing markets as well.

It also opened the flood gates to millions if not billions of 'personal' web sites. Suddenly anyone with an opinion on anything however banal or trite had the electronic means to transport their thoughts to the entire planet. Whether or not those thoughts were worth posting is an issue I prefer to not go into here. Others reading this can decide for themselves.

After I retired in 2012 I was inundated by emails from colleagues in my two professions (architecture, civil service) and old clients who were on the shelf and no longer called the shots for their respective employers, inviting me to visit their sites and read the plethora of largely meaningless comments about this, that and everything. To rid myself of these unwanted sites I had to block them and baff them off to oblivion with the delete button.

Fifteen years ago I would have recommended to anyone keen to promote and sell their work, to set up a small web site and post their images. Now - no way. Is it really work all the effort, time and work one has to put into setting up and maintaining such a site? For myself, the answer is a resounding NO.

Now I find most photo-oriented web sites I see when I surf the 'net, are for the most part uninteresting to me. Jaded I may be but I get enough stimulation from occasionally perusing a few notable exceptions - the galleries in RFF, Flickr, also a few personal sites (again mostly from here) I like and follow. Otherwise, I'm no longer keen to scroll my weary way through unending posts of unstimulating images in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions?!? of sites replete with the posters' every thought. I have enough creative work of my own to do to manage my photo archives, let alone snoop in so many others'.

The best sites I've found are those that concentrate on quality imagery with a minimum of commentary or long-winded essays on topics I basically have no interest in. For me, brevity is best.

On this last point alone I cannot help thinking that any web site I could set up would likely fold in a month...

 

[Bill Clark]

The internet was vital to the success of my business. It allowed potential clients to look at my work and determine if they should see me for possible hire.

 

[Bill Clark]

I’m retired now however, I really liked using the internet for my business.

 

[JeffS7444]

At one time or another, I've fancied creating a personal web site, but usually wind up feeling that others are already covering the same topics, and doing a better job at it. Plus I've had a sense that hardware-wise, the worlds of digital and film photography have become almost static, as the former has matured, while film's "revival" is hardly new anymore.

Although not a blog so much as a personal web site reflecting his interests at the time, I'm still really impressed by the legacy work of a teenaged Alfred Klomp, who must be around 42 at the time of this post!
ACP - Mothballed

 

[1000iso]

For the last 7 years I've been posting photos here: https://coolpixdump.tumblr.com/
It's a photo diary with a focus on "exploring the intersection between architecture, infrastructure and nature." You could say it's essentially my modern-day synthesis of New Topographics with a sprinkle of Corrine Day, if that makes sense.

I hate the Internet (yes, I say this as a person born in 1996) but I appreciate that the format of Tumblr allows people to find my work without any self promotion on my part. I expect to break 7k followers by the end of the month. I don't care about metrics like that, but I'm including it to point out that it's been a great way for my audience to find me, rather than the other way around. I think there is some value in that.

Also, many younger folk are slowly going back to the web 1.0 ways of personal websites. See: Neocities celebrates ‘the old internet,’ offering relief from 24/7 social feeds and tilde.town.

 

[JohnWolf]

At one time or another, I've fancied creating a personal web site, but usually wind up feeling that others are already covering the same topics, and doing a better job at it. Plus I've had a sense that hardware-wise, the worlds of digital and film photography have become almost static, as the former has matured, while film's "revival" is hardly new anymore.

Although not a blog so much as a personal web site reflecting his interests at the time, I'm still really impressed by the legacy work of a teenaged Alfred Klomp, who must be around 42 at the time of this post!
ACP - Mothballed

Jeff, I’d like to suggest that a website is as much for us as for any external audience. It’s a valuable process of curating and organizing your work and, once there, to review and evaluate over time. I think it’s a process worth doing if only for those reasons. Of course, a web presence isn’t the only way to do that, but the tools today make it pretty easy and enjoyable.

 

[Guth]

This does make me wonder - why do people feel the need to make blogs / photo blogs / vlogs anyway?

My guess is that there are countless answers to this question. I suspect that for many it is simply a labor of love.

In the early days of the pandemic I decided to begin writing letters to friends and family. I quickly realized that not only was my handwriting not nearly what it once was, but it would get much worse after just a few paragraphs. So I bought myself a typewriter, and then another one followed by a few more. I’m old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school, but I made a living building websites of one sort or another for the last 25 years of my career. Revisiting typewriters again after so many years was a real kick for me and I eventually wound up blogging about them. I knew that it would be a challenge to focus on such a specific subject matter, but I liked the idea of the challenge.

More than four years later I’m still at it, though it has become more difficult to continue on. There is plenty of work involved as I type up each post by typewriter first, then I scan my typed pages so that I can post my hand-typed copy as image files along with the HTML equivalent text (achieved with OCR software) for the sake of searchability. It’s all terribly inefficient, and there aren’t many people who read what I write, but that’s okay as it gives me something to do besides spending all of my time on forums like this one, lol. But the biggest challenge is coming up with new content. I suspect that I would have the same problem with a photo blog given my track record with photography.

 

[JoeV]

Bill, I can relate. I struggle to keep my blog updated. Thankfully there are the typewritten letters that keep me busy.

 

[Coldkennels]

I've been thinking about creating a blog for the first time in years. I have pages of notes and folders full of spreadsheets of all sorts of weird and arcane photographic nonsense, and they really need a home somewhere to make them accessible.

Too much of the time and energy given to the internet disappeared into barely-searchable and badly-curated social media silos over the last 10-15 years, and we really need to undo that. Plus, in that time, a lot of once-valuable repositories of information became dead links; while fantastic little pockets of knowledge like Alfred Klomp's site (as @JeffS7444 pointed out) and www.sovietcams.com still exist, so many websites have just disappeared off the face of the internet altogether (or only exist in part-broken form on the Internet Archive). It's such a shame.

 

[bulevardi]

I had a photo blog long long time ago.
However, it didn't have interaction at all, like I do have on Instagram (or Flickr before).

Perhaps I was promoting it the wrong way, or didn't find the right audience.
Back then I was thinking about publishing a monthly magazine, as a .pdf to download, perhaps with e-mail subscription, or something like that, with likeminded photography showcases...

NEVER HAPPENED !

Maybe someone else has the same idea doing such things? I can always contribute with some images.