People Forum

Tina Manley

"People" is such a wide category. Has there ever been any thought about splitting the People Forum into Portraits and PJ- Documentary-Street categories? Some of you do absolutely wonderful portraits, but I don't feel qualified to comment on them because I know nothing about lighting or portraiture. I'm sure some of the portrait people might feel the same about wading through lots of street or pj photographs to get to the portraits. There's no way to tell until we click on a thread whether it is about portraits or documentary work. Just a thought.

Tina

www.tinamanley.com

Richard

Tina Manley wrote:

"People" is such a wide category. Has there ever been any thought about splitting the People Forum into Portraits and PJ- Documentary-Street categories? Some of you do absolutely wonderful portraits, but I don't feel qualified to comment on them because I know nothing about lighting or portraiture. I'm sure some of the portrait people might feel the same about wading through lots of street or pj photographs to get to the portraits. There's no way to tell until we click on a thread whether it is about portraits or documentary work. Just a thought.

Tina

www.tinamanley.com

Stay tuned, Tina. We're working on it. Hopefully, it won't take much longer.

thoth

Richard wrote:

Stay tuned, Tina. We're working on it. Hopefully, it won't take much longer.

That's the best news I've heard all day.

Tina Manley

Richard wrote:

Stay tuned, Tina. We're working on it. Hopefully, it won't take much longer.

Thanks, Richard!!

Tina

www.tinamanley.com

Flyinggina

Yay!!

I love to look at both, but sometimes I want to concentrate on people portraits and other times I am really interested in seeing What folks are doing on the documentary/pj front. I would just love it if we could make it easier for us all to enjoy and learn.

Virginia

marikris

Hmmm, what if your photographs fall in neither category but they're still depicting people? Like, say, Ana Gaskell's works come to mind. Will there be "Other" hehe...

Richard

marikris wrote:

Hmmm, what if your photographs fall in neither category but they're still depicting people? Like, say, Ana Gaskell's works come to mind. Will there be "Other" hehe...

We do our best to make the categories clear and comprehensive, but inevitably, some pics don't quite fit. When that happens, just pick the one that's closest in spirit if not literally, and remember that we also have an Other Cool Shots forum as well.

michswiss

I'm pleased that something is happening with this. There are so many questions I have that I've held back on asking on what it means to be a PJ / Documentary / Street photographer. Looking forward to the changes.

ian408

michswiss wrote:

I'm pleased that something is happening with this. There are so many questions I have that I've held back on asking on what it means to be a PJ / Documentary / Street photographer. Looking forward to the changes.

Don't let the lack of a forum hold you back. Ask away

bdcolen

ian408 wrote:

Don't let the lack of a forum hold you back. Ask away

Definitely!

I'd suggest that if there's going to be bifurcation here, that it create a Candid People forum, which would include everything other than the formal portraiture and cheesecake stuff. I'd suggest putting that in either a Studio or Posed Portraiture forum.

I would not, however, isolate street, pj, documentary, or simply informal shooting of people, as they are all related, and really are quite broad categories.

On the other hand, I'd rather not see the People forum split up. We do all learn from one another, whether it's the street people learning techniques from the studio people, or vice versa. However - I would ask whether the cheesecake stuff really belongs in this wide-open forum. Am I the only one who assumes that there are a not insignificant number of women in this group who are offended by the scantily clad women draped over cars and motorcycles? Why not move that work into a Cheesecake Forum where those who enjoy shooting it and looking at it can do so?

ian408

The Cheescake forum is called "Go Figure"...

Tina Manley

bdcolen wrote:

Definitely!

Why not move that work into a Cheesecake Forum where those who enjoy shooting it and looking at it can do so?

Amen!

Tina

www.tinamanley.com

Llywellyn

bdcolen wrote:

Why not move that work into a Cheesecake Forum where those who enjoy shooting it and looking at it can do so?

I guess I would be considered a "cheesecake" shooter, though motorcycles and cars have yet to make an appearance in my shots. Speaking as such, I wouldn't move it out either. I learn from the candid and formal portrait stuff together, as I'm sure other of us cheesecake folks do, so why would there be nothing to learn from the cheesecake? Lighting and posing techniques from all walks of portraiture bleed into other walks. Or maybe I just view things differently, or am misunderstanding your definition of cheesecake.

"Go Figure" I consider more for artistic nudes, which is different than cheesecake in my head. I wouldn't have separated artistic nudes out, either. But again, I may just be the odd one out. :giggle

Tina Manley

Llywellyn wrote:

so why would you assume there's nothing to learn from the cheesecake? Lighting and posing techniques from all walks of portraiture bleed into other walks. :giggle

But putting cheesecake in a different forum doesn't mean others can't still look at it. I won't. I don't do lighting or posing and don't feel I can critique or learn anything from those posts. I definitely skip over them now if I can tell from the title that it's going to be cheesecake.

Tina

www.tinamanley.com

marikris

I'm just not sure what cheesecake consists of, unless we're talking about eggs, vanilla, cream cheese lol.

I don't think it's essentially "splitting" People up. The sub-forums are still in the same meta-forum, but the individual forums make it simpler. My humble opinion is that it would be easier to give a critique when the expectations of the asker is clearer, i.e., when he/she puts the picture in the more specific sub-forum.

I'm not sure if I'm completely making sense because now I'm hungry. Cheesecake...yum yum...

Trevlan

I recommend leaving it as is. But in title, people can categorize thier work.

Simple, for example:

Bubbles in the wind - PJ

Vamp Shoot - PT

Beach Day - CD

NYC - ST

Survival - DM

Hot chicks on cars - CC (LMAO)

If your shots include more than one genre, you can add more markers like:

A day in the life of Regan Blisten - PT DM CC

From now on, I'll put these 'tags' on my posts, it will make it easier to know what the thread is about.

divamum

Trevlan wrote:

I recommend leaving it as is. But in title, people can categorize thier work.

Simple, for example:

Bubbles in the wind - PJ

Vamp Shoot - PT

Beach Day - CD

NYC - ST

Survival - DM

Hot chicks on cars - CC (LMAO)

If your shots include more than one genre, you can add more markers like:

A day in the life of Regan Blisten - PT DM CC

From now on, I'll put these 'tags' on my posts, it will make it easier to know what the thread is about.

Er... given some of us have no clue what the tags mean... I'm not sure I'm any the wiser! Ok, PJ is obvious, but the others? Sorry, I'm not quite clueing in here, but then again, it would'nt be the first time I missed the obvious

Personally, I think having "people" divided up into general people shots (incl formal portraiture)/street+pj+documentary-style/go figure (nudes and/or provocative enough to be nsfw) would be a really nice setup. Child boards as subdivisions of "people" for everything other than the very active and specific dedicated weddings forum works for me! I read them all anyway (tons to learn from ALL branches of photography - I'll be honest and admit that all of my recent performance shoots hugely benefitted from perusing the weddings forum, learning great low-light techniques and also educating my eye for some more interesting angles and processing ideas to grab some shots that were more artistically interesting alongside the more typical "shoot what's there" pictures)

Hackbone

In PJ portraits aren't they directed up to a point.....even if it is just subtle? That slight direction makes the portrait better than just shoot it. Even asking them to stand here where the light would be defenitely better.

marikris

divamum wrote:

Personally, I think having "people" divided up into general people shots (incl formal portraiture)/street+pj+documentary-style/go figure (nudes and/or provocative enough to be nsfw) would be a really nice setup.

I agree with the divisions here, since each have differing goals from the others.

bdcolen

marikris wrote:

I agree with the divisions here, since each have differing goals from the others.

But here's the problem with breaking it up:

We may all have different end goals, but there's something wrong with us as photographers if we can't learn from one another.

marikris

bdcolen wrote:

But here's the problem with breaking it up:

We may all have different end goals, but there's something wrong with us as photographers if we can't learn from one another.

Right but as been said before, nothing is stopping you from clicking on the other sub-forums. I personally will be looking at all of them. I just feel like it'll be cleaner this way and allow people like Tina (who don't want to see some genre) to zero in on the ones she does want to see.

divamum

bdcolen wrote:

But here's the problem with breaking it up:

We may all have different end goals, but there's something wrong with us as photographers if we can't learn from one another.

I couldn't agree more. But am I that unusual in reading boards outside my own areas of immediate interest/skill regardless of my personal inclinations? The only ones I don't look at regularly are macro (because it's not something I've done yet, and while I appreciate the beauty, it's not of direct relevance right now since I don't even have a macro lens) and I'm not terribly active in the wildlife section simply because I'm badly (BADLY) snake-a-phobic and not everybody labels reptiles in the header so that I know before opening a thread that there's a picture which will completely freak me out

But other than that? I look at 'em all. TONS to be learned, applied, and crossed over. I kind of assumed everybody did that, but maybe not....

In any case just my overinflated 2c for what it is (or isn't) worth

marikris

divamum wrote:

But other than that? I look at 'em all. TONS to be learned, applied, and crossed over. I kind of assumed everybody did that, but maybe not....

No, no, as did I lol. Actually, I even thought this morning that I should check the Sports forum more often

Richard

bdcolen wrote:

But here's the problem with breaking it up:

We may all have different end goals, but there's something wrong with us as photographers if we can't learn from one another.

There's no reason we can't look at more than one forum, BD. Most of us do that anyway.

michswiss

I'm curious what's happening in regard to this topic. Can we get an update on the type and nature of the discussions going on behind the scenes? It just seems to be taking a long time and it might benefit from an open dialog with Dgrinners in terms of what works for us as individual photographers and as communities involved in particular styles.

Richard

michswiss wrote:

I'm curious what's happening in regard to this topic. Can we get an update on the type and nature of the discussions going on behind the scenes? It just seems to be taking a long time and it might benefit from an open dialog with Dgrinners in terms of what works for us as individual photographers and as communities involved in particular styles.

It is still under discussion as are a number of other changes as well. We pay close attention to opinions expressed in threads like this one, but I'm sure you understand that it's the job of the mods and admins to make the decisions. Be patient and keep posting.

Nikolai

While I'm all for the PJ subforum (after all, there are a lot of efforts being poured in that particular direction lately, especially since the advent of BD), I'd like to express my concerns over overdetalizations. I've seen forums (both photography-related and not) which were rendered into a mess exactly because they were trying to categorize everything. BW separate from Color separate from Studio separate from Figure separate from Portraits separate from Sunset separate from Wide Angle... The end result was nobody knew where to post what...

For instance, the sole reason for the current GF existence (imho) is to allows us pour souls who shoot scantily clad subjects to publish our work without the risk of exposing it to those who is not ready/fond to be exposed to it, especially by a random browsing. And Wedding definitely deserves its own niche since it has a lot of specifics - and frankly, we have a lot of wedding photographers here.

My only personal request would be to add "Pets and Kids" (as a single entity), since those seem to be an eternally popular subject, especially for the novice crowd...

But as the things are, I'm totally happy with the current structure.
Thou shalt not want...

gvf

I'd just as soon it didn't split between Portraits and Street - or Found/Candid - "people-photos". PEOPLE covers both, includes street shots, country shots etc.,...... people are people - and "street" also includes a group that may not centrally focus on the human figure .

It's OK. Lot of variety.

"Cheesecake" could go with Figure, but, it is People too - though for me the most distinct sub-set. Maybe for those who don't want to view them, posters for that type could indicate it on the title somehow - "risque' " or something.

Anyway, I like the variety as is. Otherwise, you can get 85 forums "B&W", Portraits", "Color", "Candid", "Street", "Abstract Treatments", "Rhode Island Short People", .......

mtbparker

I'm pretty new here, but definitely not new to forums. In fact, I've been moderator of an aviation related forum for over two years. My experience in this area is this. The desire to separate the groups is to better organize your threads. If you start splitting forums into more and more narrow topics, however, people end up unsure of exactly where to put something and the lines between the forums become blurred. (In this arena here, it would be because more and more pictures would then start to fit into multiple categories.) It's a bit counter intuitive. You're goal of making everything organized falls apart and now you've got similar threads scattered everywhere. In short, too many forums has the opposite effect of what I think y'all are trying to accomplish here.

Just my 2 cents based on my experiences.

Tom

heatherfeather

One other tidbit...

I was a grinner before we created our own little world for weddings.
Since then it has been fine, BUT we wedding folks get much fewer comments then we did before because the audience is smaller. Not the biggest of deals, (and I am not complaining in the slightest) but essentially it cuts down the number of views and therefore feedback considerably to limit the content of a section. After the wedding forum was created I did a little experiment to see the response from an e-session posted on the people forum vs the response if a similar thread was posted in weddings. The people thread had many more comments and views because of the broader topic more people frequent there. I am afraid if we compartmentalize further it will discourage folks from viewing outside of their specialty. I would be much happier with a clearer form of titling, so you know what you are looking at before you open a thread, like Franks idea with the code.

Nikolai

heatherfeather wrote:

One other tidbit...

I was a grinner before we created our own little world for weddings.
Since then it has been fine, BUT we wedding folks get much fewer comments then we did before because the audience is smaller. Not the biggest of deals, (and I am not complaining in the slightest) but essentially it cuts down the number of views and therefore feedback considerably to limit the content of a section. After the wedding forum was created I did a little experiment to see the response from an e-session posted on the people forum vs the response if a similar thread was posted in weddings. The people thread had many more comments and views because of the broader topic more people frequent there. I am afraid if we compartmentalize further it will discourage folks from viewing outside of their specialty. I would be much happier with a clearer form of titling, so you know what you are looking at before you open a thread, like Franks idea with the code.

Essentially it's a holy war between two approaches - hard folders (e.g. typical file system) and "virtual folders", aka tags/labels (e.g. gmail). Folders are efficient, but very rigid and do not allow for one item to be present in multiple places. Tags can be assigned in swarms, but tend to be a bit too loose (famous conundrum: plural or singular?) and, unless firmly controlled (you say "nude", I say "nudity":-), ultimately less effective. Given the current status of the forum software (Visual Bulletin) and its "hard folder" oriented architecture, I don't think we have too many options...

Speaking of wedding forum and the decreased amount of views/comments... Naturally our goals differ, but I'd rather have one serious comment from Scott, Aaron, Sean or David (and quite a few others - sorry, too long a list:-) than a dozen pats from the people I never met before (but yes, I take those, too :-)

I guess our mods are well aware of the situation and trying to find the best approach giving the software limitations and known best practices... Thus far they manage to do quite well in this regards and I have all the faith they will continue to do so:-)