If you have a blog and you have "sitemeter" and a comments page, you have a pretty good idea what your audience is hungry for. What gets the hits? What gets the links? What gets all the smart readers onto their keyboards and typing insightful comments? At this blog, the hits peak and the readers chime in with all the Echolilia excavations: weird pictures of kids, pictures of pills, scans of partially legible scribblings, attempted views into the psyche of a kid. What gets everyone's eyes rolling? What gets hits that time in at 1 second or less? It's this commercial stuff I plug every now and then...that is what the readers have little or no patience for. Colin Pantall sends a private email stating: "You don't have to limit yourself to being a marketing machine!!"
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But I do....I do.
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I'm up in Colorado Springs photographing Olympic wrestler T.C. Dantzler for a few days after last weeks Yosemite project, so my access to kids, scans, etc has been kept to a minimum. I'll need to keep this commercial stuff rolling this week...just bear with me....
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Above, a project created with Shannon Amos for Randi Silbermann of Spectrum Magazine.
5 comments:
But you don't... you don't!
I like the commercial stuff. There's plenty of room.
i think because there's such a massive gap between the commercial work and the personal work, and the personal work just oozes of feeling and substance.
and everyone wants to think they can just shoot what they want, and never stop to shoot anything that puts food on the table or gas in the tank.
just don't forget, at least in my eyes, what really puts you on the map, what keeps me looking at your blog, is the personal work.
and if someone was really harsh, they could make the case that posting commercial work on a blog, (even on a commercial photographer site), dilutes the power of the idea and connotation of TA. it's like we don't want to know the truth -- that we/you have to work for money sometimes. it's like -- please dont bother showing us that commercial job. we came here looking for substance and intimacy, and a personal view of personal work.
just kidding, but not really.
Thanks for your insights, Anonymous.
I hear where you are coming from- the blog is more pure if it is simply a vehicle to watch this personal project grow. That is a neat thing to tune into, for photographers, of whom I imagine is most of this blogs readership.
But...then there is this hope that I have that people whom have the power to hire me are tuning in, like my commercial work, can acknowledge the power of a personal project ( though not have a commercial need for it ), and can see what new commercial stuff I'm working on in a blog friendly, speedy, easily updated a blogspeed type of manner. Does this happen? I think it may have happened already, but I do think at the end of the day, this blog is mostly read by photographers.
But you can mix and match,Tim, isn't that the point of saying you don't have to be JUST a marketing machine - the alternative is to have two blogs, which might be good in some ways, but would take up so much more time.
I think the Echolilia project is great, and on a personal level for you it is probably great because it is your own work and keeps you sane and is also an excuse to hang out with your son/family (as opposed to other personal projects where the work takes you away from him - just like commercial work). And it can survive being mixed and matched, as can the commercial work. People can appreciate that, including most people in the commercial world - it adds rather than takes away ( and if there is anyone that anal and controlling in the commercial world who wants you to stay within their frame of reference all the time and thinks you should only show new commercial work, well, what can you do? Which is a polite way of saying something else.)
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