After a long search for a good community to show and discuss photography i just bought myself a one year subcription of photo.net. I did not find a better community, although photo.net is showing mostly placative shots. But on a good level - and i also found a lot of good photographers there.
In the last years i had to learn: THE perfect community for photographers will be probable only a dream - f.e. Flickr is the biggest community of the world, but i dislike the rubbish white background, which is destroying the tones of each low key or available light photo. And Flickr has a big problem with their mass of uploads. It is all too much there, it leads to flippancy and i dislike that too. Flickr is not bad as a second community and/or to stay in contact with good photographers - but to me it is "all too much" and to big there: Too much photos, too much uploads, too much groups, too much of everything. So everything costs too much time and you do not find the photographers and the images, you are interested in amongst this huge mass of shown shots - each new good image is erasing the effect of a good image, that you found before.
So you are drowned with contacts and photos there, and this is against my principles of "less is more". Even good photographers can't resist of showing shot by shot (because of the Flickr flatrate), and there are times, where you have to look at 40,50 shots the day of ONE single contact. Others are "only" showing 5 shots, but in the end your, lets say 40,50 contacts are presenting you 100 or more shots, day by day - around the clock. You know, what i mean with the "Flickr-too much-syndrome"? ;-)
Other communities have big problems with trouble makers, fake accounts and trolls, like the german "Fotocommunity", better known as "FC" (in these days it should be translated as Fake Community). The admins of the FC are totally cack-handed, and as if this was not enough: The price of a full membership is extremely high, you only get a handfull uploads the week, even as full member. So it is the other extreme to the Flickr mass of shots - and as a result of the trouble there, more and more good photographers have left the FC or have changed to a free account. So the FC is photographically becoming more and more uninteresting for engaged photographers. It is a place for newcomers, snapshooters and people, who are more interested in talking or wasting their time than in shooting. A vanity club on a very low level.
Some more minus points of the FC: As freemember they are adding a special advertising to your shots and they will delete your old portfolio, if you should decide, to go back from fullaccount to freeaccount. (F.e. Flickr will never delete any image of you.)
And their new google-advertising for freeaccounts can be very tasteless, f.e. if you are showing images of the KZ Dachau, it could be, that you find advertising for "holidays in Israel" beside your photo. So it is really unacceptable to me, to spend time and money for a new FC-account. Much money, less performance, very few number of good photographers - and a lot of trouble with all the well known idiots (sorry, i should have called them "experts") there, who frequently are showing their bad habits under the "gallery" images. I cannot take this community seriously any more.
Other communities are too small, too expensive or too far away from serious photography, so i hope, that i have found in Photo.net a good new community, where i can show my images and talk about photography. You find my new Photo.net-account
HERE.
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