Are you proud of every photo posted ??

scott199

scott199

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Yes
(I've posted this in general as well, but seems i may get more dedicated answers here, i would like to leave it in general as well as its across the board I'm interested in, not just sports)



I’m newish to all this and really new to posting online, recently (4/5 months ago) started helping a local football club and noticed week by week my standards I post online (Flickr/Facebook) seem to be dropping, possibly due to getting them out quite quick for match reports, possibly the fact they don’t really go anywhere or maybe something else ?

I’m kind of confused, most of me says keep your standards high, as I’m trying to build for the future, the other half says, no point wasting hours and hours editing for barely anyone to see them.

So would you say, you are you 100% proud of every picture you post ??

( I don't get paid, so its not a business)
 
Proud - No.
Passes QC - Yes - with some exceptions.

When photographing sport you have little control of what happens, you can't stage manage things, so there will be events that happen - a tackle, a kick, an overtake, a crash which may not be technically excellent, or you may not have the most ideal view, but may mean something to the person(s) within the photograph, or could work out to be the key point in a match or even a season that is deserving of some recognition.

Quality control means filtering out the shots that don't make the grade, although there may be exceptions where a photo that is less sharp than it could be gets included because the photo contains an key important moment - eg a player making their debut scoring a goal/try/whatever.
 
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andrewc said:
Proud - No.
Passes QC - Yes - with some exceptions.

When photographing sport you have little control of what happens, you can't stage manage things, so there will be events that happen - a tackle, a kick, an overtake, a crash which may not be technically excellent, or you may not have the most ideal view, but may mean something to the person(s) within the photograph, or could work out to be the key point in a match or even a season that is deserving of some recognition.

Quality control means filtering out the shots that don't make the grade, although there may be exceptions where a photo that is less sharp than it could be get included because the photo contains an key important moment - eg a player making their debut scoring a goal/try/whatever.
Click to expand...

cheers, interesting perspective to think about, maybe the action/event in the pic outweighs the technical perfection or maybe could/should?
 
Photographers tend to be overly critical of photos - not perfectly sharp, not quite in focus, whereas the customer is more concerned about the moment it captured. So whilst you may not put a shot you're not proud of in your portfolio or your 'review of the year' gallery, it doesn't mean that someone else isn't proud of the shot and are grateful to you for being there, especially if no-one else got the shot.
 
Definitely not proud of all the photos that I have ever put online or sold - looking at some of the first images that clients paid me for, I wonder if they were blind.
Then again - my equipment has changed from the 400D and Sigma 18-200 and 70-300, to something a bit more expensive. (and yes, I know the gear isn't the key always.. but it helps).
These days, yes it all passes my QC - but sometimes you know you could have taken a certain image a little better, or the best one was too much OOF.

But for me, not being happy with the images each and every night, just makes me eager to keep improving and pushing myself to be better.

And as Andrew has said, sports is a tricky one to shoot at times - when you have no control over so many of the elements.

Also - sports photography might be the last one where you end up making enough money to retire ;-)
You need to be a little bit crazy to keep at covering sports for many year... or at least it helps.
 
Thank you all, seems I need to get used to rating the “action” in the shot moreover than the technical aspect, although being the way I am, means perfection will always be chased and never caught.

Looking back through, the main areas I seem to struggle or fight morally with is,the final editing/colours etc, so I may re-edit a few times with what I want and what others will see as “normal” and then I generally go with what I think is “normal” hence maybe the reason I’m not 100% happy.

Do you ever feel this way ??
 
I post photos for lots of reasons, but generally pride isn't one. Sometimes, especially early on, I was deliberately seeking criticism from others. Sometimes they're just record shots of people or events, sometimes it's to please other people and sometimes it's because I really like my images.

I've long believed that good enough is better than un-acheivable perfection. No image is ever perfect, and therefore it is enough to do the best that you can reasonably manage and be satisfied with that. If an image has sufficient flaws that I am not satisfied then I suspect it's too badly flawed to begin with and should be set aside, either for a fresh working later or discarding.
 
Not always happy with my footy pics (kids football) but as others have said sometimes it's about the moment or a parent getting there kid in pic scoring etc, also a lot of them only look at pics via Facebook on there phones so not the same as what you see on a big screen [emoji15]
 
Maybe not always, which is OK, but now I've gone the other way and not posted anything for far too long and that's by far the worse thing to do in todays crazy social-media-driven world.
 
Agree with Andrew’s comments above. Some of our images may not be the best but they mean a lot to the guys we capture in action. Point in case was a vet rugby player who was so pleased to have images I’d got of him dancing through defenders to score a try at the Cardiff Arms Park. ‘I can show my boys I can still shift over 10metres’ was his comment. Great to hear that feedback from a guy who admitted not having many photos of him laying in younger years. Not only our bet work will be the stuff that counts. I used to want to post all my images - far more selective and cropping more than ever now and enjoying what I put out. But if the odd blurry, slightly oof image calls, it will still make it too. Damn the critics - it’s your shot and if you like it be proud of it alongside the good stuff! GooGaBu is also right - you need to be a little crazy to cover sports for any length of time - but these young bucks will all be veterans some day.
 
Definitely not proud of every shot, but it depends on who I’m showing or posting them too. The junior colts rugby I Shoot aren’t that discerning ,so I generally weed out the really bad o.o.f /poor compo. & send the boys a link to the set on my smugmug page, so theres some duff ones but the boys dont care, I’ve caught the moment which is what they’re interested in , I Leave them up there for a week or two (long enough for the boys to grab the ones they like) which are used on their phones etc.and then I set the page to private . For images used by the club I’m more selective as in the past I’ve left it to the guy who runs their social media before to select decent images and he fired the whole set up onto the pitchero page, a lesson learnt for me - If theres something you dont want anyone to see or are embarrassed about delete it .
 
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