Popping in to say "Hi" | It's been a minute

[C J Southern]

How's everyone? Any of the "old gang" still active?

[pnodrog]

Hi Colin. I only visit occassionally now and hardly ever post. The site is far less active than when you were around. I think it's because there is no direct way of posting an image but nobody seems to agree with me. Certainly I can't be bothered first having to post to another site and then using a link.

Trust you are keeping well. You were starting to use a drone before you left.I assume by now you have some great drone shots.

All the best.

[Manfred M]

Hi Colin - Nice to see that you are still around.

Donald left about 18 months ago, but Dave H and I are still around, at least on occasion.

Donald has moved more into contemporary fine art work and that is not really a strength of this site. I still see his work on Facebook.

I agree with Paul, that the demise of TinyPic did not help and posting is much more complex now.

There has definitely been a drop off of core users, but that is something that we have seen throughout the photographic world. Photography clubs lost a lot of members during Covid. Photographers have gotten older and no longer want to drag around heavy cameras and lenses. Phone cameras are "good enough" for many people.

Many people that still use traditional cameras are getting images that suit their purposes and don't really need the education and critique of others that this site offers.

[C J Southern]

Hi Colin. I only visit occassionally now and hardly ever post. The site is far less active than when you were around. I think it's because there is no direct way of posting an image but nobody seems to agree with me. Certainly I can't be bothered first having to post to another site and then using a link.

Trust you are keeping well. You were starting to use a drone before you left.I assume by now you have some great drone shots.

All the best.

Hi Paul,

Yeah - I had to "scratch my head" a bit to work out how include an image; luckily I still have a paid account with PBase, which allows direct linking to material. We seem to now live in a world where it's nice to be able to just drag-and-drop objects and have the rest "taken care of" for us.

It was probably a decade or so ago when I last posted; I think that aligned quite well with my RC helicopter days in which I experimented occasionally with a camera (and even my first iPhone once) attached.

I ended up buying my first drone about a year ago (a DJI Nano), which has been an interesting experience. I think it's incredible what the technology can do, but I still only use it either for a bit of fun and/or getting some "bird's eye" footage of areas I can't physically get to - so more "fun" or "functional" than anything "artistic".

[C J Southern]

Hi Colin - Nice to see that you are still around.

Donald left about 18 months ago, but Dave H and I are still around, at least on occasion.

Donald has moved more into contemporary fine art work and that is not really a strength of this site. I still see his work on Facebook.

I agree with Paul, that the demise of TinyPic did not help and posting is much more complex now.

There has definitely been a drop off of core users, but that is something that we have seen throughout the photographic world. Photography clubs lost a lot of members during Covid. Photographers have gotten older and no longer want to drag around heavy cameras and lenses. Phone cameras are "good enough" for many people.

Many people that still use traditional cameras are getting images that suit their purposes and don't really need the education and critique of others that this site offers.

Hi Manfred,

Thanks! Just a few more days to go until I get superannuation now, but I think retirement is still a decade away.

It does seem very quiet here. The site seems very slow too (took about 30 seconds for my reply to Paul to be processed); not sure if that's deliberate throttling for "new" users or something else.

Thanks for the update on Donald; I don't use Facebook but good to know that he's still active in photography.

To be honest, I'm pretty disconnected from what's happening in the traditional photography world now; I still use my gear for art digitisation for a small number of artists - and the occasional photos of grandkids - but that's about it. Hopefully once day I'll get to travel a bit further and can get some inspiration from some new areas.

I do see some of the new "toys" that pop up on YouTube videos though - like the 360 degree drone that Insta 360 have announced; the demo footage looks incredible; I feel like even I could get some 1/2 decent footage ... if only I had a need for it. Perhaps many of what were the core "traditional gear" base are now more just "content consumers" or "content appreciators" (or both)?

[DanK]

Colin,

Good to see you back here, even if only for a passing visit.

The lag you experienced has been plaguing the site for months. Sean is aware of it. I don't understand enough about web hosting to know what is causing it, but it's random and frequent.

I wouldn't be surprised if this has driven away traffic, particularly because for some people (I'm not one of them), this is layered on top of their difficulty posting photos. (I have a Smugmug account, so for me, posting here is trivially easy.) I have to admit that even though I'm one of the more active ones here, I've considered dropping off more than once because of the lags.

The drop-off in participation seems quite dramatic, both in the number of people posting and in the frequency of their posts. I'm guilty of the latter, not because of a lack of interest, but because photography has taken a back seat in my life for a while because of the press of other things. I hope to change that later this fall. I suspect that the improvement of computational photography has hurt the site, as people on the margin often now consider phone photos good enough.

It's really a pity because there are very few sites where one can get useful critiques of images. I also follow a few other sites, and there has been a debate about this on Focus on Photography, which is the successor to POTN. A few people have posted asking for critiques, that's not the audience: mostly it's long threads ("Post your best flower photos" is now up to 148 pages, without many comments other than likes and brief praise).

Re Drones: I bought a DJI Air 2 a could of years ago. Even shooting raw, the camera is pretty mediocre, and it's very cumbersome to try to exert any control, but I found that it opens up an entirely different type of photography. Things that make for a good drone shot are often quite different from the features one looks for with feet on the ground. My drone photography is still pretty primitive, but I'll post a few from a couple of years ago below.

Dan

[billtils]

A somewhat different perspective on the "posting an image is too convoluted" theme. I use flickr as my main resource for sharing with family and friends and for off-site storage/back-up, so posting here is not a problem. Yes, there is a fee for pro membership but it's nowhere near to being a deal breaker.

Pretty much the same applies to smugmug users (like Dan ...).

[Geoff F]

Hello. Good to see someone from long ago returning to this site. Several old timers are still here along with a few newcomers. Quite a few have made a couple of posts then drifted away.

As others have mentioned, there is a bit of a site slowness issue on occasions and the lack of direct posting probably puts off some potential new members. I also link from P base

https://pbase.com/crustacean

I find it is worth paying just a little fee to use a secure hosting site without adverts or personal details being sold on elsewhere. To my way of thinking about using the internet, either you pay for a product or you become a product.

Many of the smaller independent internet sites have had a considerable reduction in user numbers. A once busy wildlife site which I regularly visit is down to just a handful of regular contributors now.

[billtils]

I find it is worth paying just a little fee to use a secure hosting site without adverts or personal details being sold on elsewhere. To my way of thinking about using the internet, either you pay for a product or you become a product.

.

Spot on Geoff

[C J Southern]

Hi Dan,

Thanks.

Hopefully Sean will get to the bottom of it. A few years ago I read something that gave insight into "site speed" vs "people's patience" - and as it turns out, patience is surprisingly short - to the point where a delay of even a few seconds is enough to quickly put people off.

I don't have any degrees in psychology, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was also a "it's worth what people pay for it" dynamic in that access to most sites is free - and because people don't have any money invested in it, it only has very little value to them - and thus they have little hesitation in abandoning something that has little value to them when the value proposion from other sites is better (ie faster / better and also free). It's a "dog-eat-dog" world. Dunno - just my thoughts on it.

Maybe it's also part of a natural "churn" or isn't competing as well as it used to with other sites and life events that are all competing for people's time and attention? Personally, my interests have changed over the years - and things that I used to be involved in to the point of obsession (RC helicopers, traditional photography, CiC) have been almost completely replaced by other things (hiking, drones, learning with AI). Someone once said "life is like a moving parade"; I think that's true.

Interestingly, I've seen some really creative material (sometimes) shot only on a smartphone (edit: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BlJ42P_yiZ8 is a great example) - but getting those great results still involves "thinking outside the box" in addition to knowledge & experience which, was also true for conventional photography - so perhaps a case of "the more things change, the more they remain the same". Maybe CiC would benefit from a forum or two that embraced "iPhone-ography" and drone-ography? It's probably been 10 to 15 years since I came up with the structure of the forums (that Sean implimented) that are still in use here today; might be time for a refresh?.

I spent a few years on Facebook and - for a while - tried transitioning to FB based photography forums but, alas, it just wasn't a structure or community that "floated my boat". Too much chaff, not enough wheat for me; quantity was never an issue, but quality varied significantly. Personally, I'm more of a critical thinker than ever and am very careful as to what I give credibility to; paying particular attention to the training, qualifications, experience, and credible research of people making assertions - which wasn't/isn't a good fit with most of social media where most assertions appear to be made by people with no relevant training, qualifications, or experience - and people accept or reject that based on nothing more than whether it's something that they want to believe is true or not; and that's something that's been hard for me to deal with on social media because the sheer amount of noise just drowns out the quality stuff.

I'm convinced there's still a place for quality over quantity in social sites (from the Facebooks and Twitters to sites like this at the other extreme), but I don't know what it takes to attract a solid base of like-minded people; heck I have more rational conversations with Chat GPT than it's possible to have in the likes of YouTube comments!

Someone once said "the key to getting interesting photos is to stick your camera in interesting places" - and I think drones make it easy to do that thus opening up something different. This is a few photos stiched together from a staging area on one of the hill climbs I like to do every weekend; couldn't have got it without the elevation above ground level made possible with the drone:

[C J Southern]

A somewhat different perspective on the "posting an image is too convoluted" theme. I use flickr as my main resource for sharing with family and friends and for off-site storage/back-up, so posting here is not a problem. Yes, there is a fee for pro membership but it's nowhere near to being a deal breaker.

Pretty much the same applies to smugmug users (like Dan ...).

Same for me with Pbase; works out at something less than $1 a week. Maybe it's one of those dynamics in life where people invest more energy in thinking up an excuse as to why they don't want to do something than it would take to just do it.

I'm certainly guilty of that far too often!

[C J Southern]

Hello. Good to see someone from long ago returning to this site. Several old timers are still here along with a few newcomers. Quite a few have made a couple of posts then drifted away.

As others have mentioned, there is a bit of a site slowness issue on occasions and the lack of direct posting probably puts off some potential new members. I also link from P base

https://pbase.com/crustacean

I find it is worth paying just a little fee to use a secure hosting site without adverts or personal details being sold on elsewhere. To my way of thinking about using the internet, either you pay for a product or you become a product.

Many of the smaller independent internet sites have had a considerable reduction in user numbers. A once busy wildlife site which I regularly visit is down to just a handful of regular contributors now.

Hi Geoff - how have you been?

I think it's true to say that the world's social dynamics have changed a lot. Social media in all of its various forms have been the dominant driver for that change, but I think that they've largely done it irresponsibly; favouring their own commercial self-interest over dynamics that promote rational/critical thinking - so we often get "pastry chef interpretaions of MRIs" - and people giving credibility to the pastry chef over the interpretation of a trained, qualified, and experienced diagnostic radiologist because <insert some irrational nonsense here>. It's so "anti-intellectual"; people are getting more "tribal" and more opinionated about things they have no knowledge of (and are thus not qualified to comment on); the problem is that the "universe" doesn't care and coldly dishes out the consequences of their decisions regardless. The chaff / noise is winning. I do think there's hope - but it involves attracting non-intellectually-lazy people who value quality over quantity.

I wish I had more answers, but sadly I don't.

It's quite an eye-opener as to how many ad-trackers / marketing databases many sites actively push data to; I've sometimes counted dozens from just a single free news site. It's not something that used to bother me, but now I'm starting to feel more uneasy about it ... to the point where I now mostly just use a custom GPT to prepare daily news briefings for me.