Click on the image above to go to my Instagram feed or on the “more” link below to read the post.
Please comment – always appreciated.
Objective of Post
This post looks at how social media supports my objectives of 10,000 hours deliberate practice learning photography; supports and/ or distracts by providing a source of:
- Feedback
- Image Storage
- Awareness
My social media following on all platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Flickr is very limited; less than 100 on any one. It consists almost exclusively of fellow photographers; very few “real world” friends follow me. My wife doesn’t follow me on any platform, other than my personal Facebook.
I also only follow a few other photographers whose work I am genuinely interested in. I have made no attempts to swell my follower base as I’m very aware that this can become an all consuming goal that will distract from my main objective.
Feedback
One of the requirements of growth as defined in my “Why 10,000 hours” post is to constantly obtain feedback from the field. In his book, “Creativity, the psychology of discovery and invention”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, defines the “field” as the group of experts that determine excellence in a “domain”. How well social media fulfils this objective is perhaps open to question as not all, even of my elite and esteemed group of, followers are necessarily experts.
However, for almost anybody, the number of Instagram likes received will correlate positively with the impact of the image posted. This is not necessarily the same as the aesthetic value of the image posted, but is undeniably a data point.
Image Archive
I shoot a lot of images and occasionally have a requirement to show these to other people. Flickr albums are the most convenient way I’ve found of doing this, and enable me to link to individual images so that anyone viewing an image on my journal can click through to see a higher resolution image in context with other images.
Awareness
In theory having a solid Instagram, or other social media, following would increase awareness of what I’m doing and drive traffic to my website. Should this become important to me, maybe when I have completed or nearly completed my 10,000 hours, I will pay more attention to it. For now though, counting followers is a distraction from the main goal for the project.
Strategy
The following describes how I use social media platforms and their relative importance in this project.
Flickr
Main resource for holding my images. As of 31st January 2021 I have uploaded 6,230 images to this site since starting this project. This is an average of just over 5¼ per day. The majority of these images were uploaded directly from Lightroom and are stored in one or more albums.
Although this is my least curated social media site, the albums provide structure and allow images to be grouped in much the same way as Lightroom Collections.
Images that are in my “Competition Entries” album are typically also in another album which relates to the context in which they were originally shot.
This is a curated feed of my current project. People who click on this should be able to get an appreciation of what I’m about at as photographer, at least at this moment.
I upload in blocks of 3 images to provide a sense of context and to hopefully make the images look good in a group when viewed on a computer rather than just a phone. Working with groups of images is also a key development goal at the moment.
The Photo10KH Facebook Page is linked to my personal Facebook account so I tend to use it pure for groups of images that may be of interest to people I know, e.g., travel images or specific topics.
Tactics
At the outset of this project I defined what counts as deliberate practice. This was always going to be a contentious, and largely arbitrary, set of parameters, but adherence to a consistent set of rules is critical to the validity of the project; and my self defined rules allow for up to one hour of working on social media per day.
An hour at the end of the day spent reflecting on what has been achieved and selecting images for uploading to Instagram or Facebook. As always the workflow should be as automated as possible, and to this end I have written Photoshop Actions to create appropriately sized and logoed Jpeg files.
Always looking for more efficient ways of doing this.