Has digital imaging heralded a downturn in photographic quality?

Today an article stated that somebody had taken 80,000 pictures with their digital camera over a period of ten years. That works out at 22 photographs a day. This claim is something that seems incredibly far fetched. Indeed, more than just far fetched, it sounds like an addiction problem that needs medical intervention.

Just how many of those 80,000 photographs were actually worth taking? A few years ago I was asked to photograph a wedding. I believe I took 500 images over the process of that wedding which was rather a lot considering the wedding. The typical wedding album contains maybe two dozen photographs. Bigger albums tend to bore viewers as people don't have a great attention span. Think back to the days when people groaned about being roped in to view slideshows of somebody's holiday with the inevitable "now just to the left of here was this really nifty..." which begged the question - where was the photo of it?

People take far too many photos today. Not just too many but too many utterly banal images. Just as an example, here's a totally banal image that means nothing to anybody who's viewing it now. It's the bottom of a shower that needs finishing. On its own - totally banal. Of no real interest to anybody bar the people involved in construction.

Is this the depth to which photography has sunk? People take this type of picture every day and publish them online and in their photo albums.

Back in the days when everybody used film, fewer cameras were sold, fewer photographs were taken and photography was of a higher quality. Everybody thought about the picture they were about to take rather than taking it anyway and seeing if it was worth taking, later. People would take 36 photographs on a roll of film. People would take one or maybe two rolls of film when they were on holiday and would come back with 72 really good photographs. These days, people go on holiday and might as well video the entire holiday with Google Glass and edit later. Seriously, 80,000 pictures in 10 years or 8,000 pictures in a year!

I have been taking digital images for about 10 years. Aside from two or three times when people paid me to take pictures in which case I did take several hundred each time, I have not taken more than a very few thousand. The counter on my Canon XT which is now 7 years old stands at about 5,000 images. I normally don't take that many photos. I certainly take more than I did in my film days and acknowledge that sometimes I take several mediocre photos because I'm too lazy to make sure I get one really great photo.

One of the dafter things about digital imaging is that people believe every image can be fixed after exposure. They can't be fixed - they can be cosmetically modified but that is all. A bad photograph will be a bad photograph whatever. There's a lunatic fringe that believes that by cropping a poorly executed photograph will produce a good result. It does not - it produces exactly a cropped, poorly executed photograph. A lot of the people that come out with nonsense like that need to pick up a real camera and to use slide film. Then perhaps they might learn to compose before pressing the button. I do swear that if people could keep the shutter going 24x7 at 20 frames a second, they would and would then choose their images later in a marathon editing session that would last months.

People are not working smarter - they're working harder. Instead of composing and taking the picture, they're photographing everything and then spending days on their computer trying to fix problems caused by lack of photographic skill.

This photograph is uncropped - it was taken with the subject balanced. Notice how the subject fills the frame and the photograph reads from right to left.  There's perspective, contrast and color. Everything is nicely centered with the Landrover nicely on a third.  This photograph needs no cropping because it has been well photographed.

This photograph by contrast is clearly off-center. The lover of cropping would want to crop the right hand side of the image yet this would do nothing to correct the incorrect perspective or the unevenness of the railings.  

Digital has certainly facilitated people's acceptance of poorer quality images. It has also heralded the over-edited image which at some point ceases to be a photograph and becomes digital art. Digital imaging has certainly heralded a downturn in photographic quality.

How much effort is a website worth?

How much money and effort should you put into a website? When do you pull the plug? What's the decision process behind pulling the plug? Why did you put the website up in the first place? There're a lot of questions there and a lot of different answers too.

Nobody can tell you how much money or effort to put into a website since largely websites are vanity items for companies, corporations and individuals. The internet is the world's largest entertainment medium. The biggest websites for visitor numbers are search engines and social networking sites. In the top 25 there are but two shopping sites and one pay-per-view porn site. That tells you that people favor entertainment 8 times more highly than commerce.

The question now becomes more of what entertainment value will your website provide. Entertainment has to be provided along with any possible e-commerce. At one time Kahr Arms had a flash game on their website (which sold small arms) in which you could shoot terrorists as they bobbed up and down from behind a burger bar. It was entertaining but nowhere near as entertaining as the game in which one had to hit John Prescott (The British Home Secretary of a few years back) with an egg, prompted by the famous egging incident. As is often said about newspapers - today's news, tomorrow's chip papers - newsworthy events become stale over time. Thus, any entertainment has to be fresh which means constant updates.

So, a website has to be entertaining and has to capture the imagination and has to be updated frequently. Gosh now that sounds like a lot of design work and a lot of work to keep it updated. This is sounding expensive! Now imagine you're not MegaCorp PLC and don't have a massive budget to throw at a website. Your budget is more modest and won't pay for games and a fancy website. Well, the public isn't going to like it as much. Imagine you're Joe Soap or indeed Zephod Beeblebrox with no budget. That website is going to have to be very niche in order to attract viewers.

Initially this blog was a photography website aimed at selling photography but as there was an insufficient market for photography - particularly in South Carolina - the paid website was dropped and the site was started on a free blogging site. Even that cost too much and the paid domain names were dropped.

The subject of photography was considered for the blog but as so many sites cover the how-to aspects of photography, it was decided to concentrate on the business aspects, the internet aspects and reviews of photography and internet or business books relating to photography. It was also decided not to worry too much about readership. When there are about 500 articles, the blog will probably be big enough that search engines begin to find the articles. Currently there are just under 200.

The purpose of this blog or rather web presence has changed over the years. Originally it was "here's my work. I'm a photographer. Hire me". That didn't work. There is very little opportunity to sell photography in a state noted for being the poorest in the union and a state where 50% of the population is on some form of welfare and the rest are stuck working in some miserable McJob.

The decision behind pulling the plug on a website is based on visitor numbers and or income. This blog gets an unknown number of visitors for example. As it doesn't cost money, it's not something that needs to be pulled. In a purely commercial world, something that hasn't a concrete visitor count and or concrete income after a year needs to be dumped. It's very easy in the technology world to say "now if I do this" or "if I spend a few dollars here" which before long turns out to be vast sums and vast time expenditure to no effect.

Before starting a website, it's best to have a clear plan of what needs to be achieved and a clear date by which time, if the achievements have not been met to axe the site. If it's not going to work, it's not going to work no matter how much time or money is thrown away on it. There are hoards of purse-lighteners out there willing to take money with false promises of fame, fortune and popularity. It's all codswallop. Stick to first principles like this site did. It made no money so the bits that cost money were curtailed.

Who's going to find your website?

It doesn't matter whether you have a photography website or a blog though with a blog there's more chance of people finding it since each entry can have its own meta tags. The question is though - who is going to find your blog or website? How are they going to find it?

Meta tags were mentioned just now. They are one of the keys that used to be heavily used by Google in order to locate websites. According to Google:

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

Now that's about as clear as mud. If you want to become even more confused then this is the page to read: How Google Search Works. My understanding is that meta tags help but aren't the whole answer. Throughout this blog, key search terms have been used. These are called "labels" by Google's blogspot. Two techniques have been used for the labels. Initially keyword mirroring was used where keywords and key phrases in the text were mirrored as labels for the blog entries. Subsequently, labels were used that would describe the blog entry or the sections of the blog entry - more as possible search terms.

Somewhere, it was written that people would search for "wedding photographer maui" rather than "Joe Bloggs Photography". This approach to blog labels is currently underway. This didn't really seem to produce any positive results. Indeed, when a search was just undertaken for "zombiestat" this link came up on top: http://spamspoiler.blogspot.com/2012/12/adsense-watchdog-zombiestat-vampirestat.html when in fact there is just such a blog entry on this blog - here: http://tehisp.blogspot.com/2013/12/vampirestat-zomiestat-adsensewatchdog.html. Using one of the page rank checkers, the site couldn't be found in the first 10 pages of the Google search using "Zombiestat" or "adsensewatchdog" as search terms.

Looking at the searches that have found my website, they are the following:

Entry	Pageviews
mystyle,myvision,myway	74
www.britphoto.us	30
http://britishphotography.us/	27
pornhub	17
www.britishphotography.us	11
britishphotography.us	5
bit.ly	4
http://www.britphoto.us	4
calumet closing	3
led light panel	3

Now the question having seen this is what difference does having a search term make? Very little, judging from those search terms. People are definitely viewing the blog judging from the viewing figures but absolutely not from any of the search terms that have been entered.

Of the 10 listed search terms that have been used since inception of this blog on July 12th, 2013 (the blog is a year old - yay), 5 have been people typing the web address into a search box instead of into the address box. One has been the result of my Twitter bot - 4 visits from Twitter in a year means that Twitter is worth exactly the money invested in opening a Twitter account. "Pornhub" is a term that has ever been used in this blog until now. Baidu - the Chinese search engine always does lookups under the blog title. This leaves just two entries as genuine searches. That's not promising.

In terms of visitors, the blog is much healthier though how many are human as opposed to robot remains to be seen.

The above is the last 30 days of web traffic. Heaven alone knows why there was such a spike on June 25th. The post on June 25th received just 32 visitors to date.

So, various tactics have been used, including discussing popular current events such as Calumet closing, which received 167 visitors to date. Nothing that has been used in active blog promotion seems to have worked at all. That's incredibly interesting. My other blog doesn't get any advertising at all yet manages to get a background rumble of web traffic that works out at about 50% of the traffic this blog gets. The search terms are marginally more nonsensical with made-up search terms that don't occur anywhere in the blog.

Now let's look at Google's other set of figures - Google Analytics - which matches quite nicely with what one of the independent counters used to say and disagrees strongly with Blogger's figures. Today Blogger says the site (thus far has had 231 page views). Google Analytics says there have been 28. There's quite a discrepancy there. Over an all time range, Google Analytics says there have been 21,462 page views and Google Blogger says there have been 39,527.

Given the fact that none of the perceived wisdom on how to index a website successfully seems to work and given that two sets of figures by the same organization can differ so wildly, is there anything that can be relied upon? Really, who is going to find your website aside from the spam bots and will you even know whether your site has been viewed by a real person or a bot? Are any of the figures really accurate? Is there perhaps just me and a tin of baked beans viewing my blog?