Kickstarter

I've added a link in the Elsewhere list over in the right column to the Kickstarter Photography Projects, of which there are currently 106.  Kickstarter provides a way to fund creative ideas through small donations.  Rewards for donors, aside from the satisfaction of supporting a worthy endeavor, include postcards, prints and print collections.  For project originators, a Kickstarter presentation provides not only needed funding, but also an impetus and a structure to get a project under way.

Joshua Marowitz

The photo above is from Joshua Marowitz's  The Natives Salt Print Project.  He's got to within 51% of his goal with twenty days to go.  He will only get funding if the goal is met, so if you've got some spare cash, this looks like an excellent investment in a promising talent.

Quality Images

I spend a lot of time looking at photographs on line.  I follow quite a few blogs devoted to photography with old film cameras, and I also regularly visit some of the big photo sharing sites including Flickr and Photo.net.  Millions of photos are posted daily on such sites, so some kind of viewing strategy is imperative.  All the photo sharing sites give you a hand in finding worthwhile images using a combination of computer algorithms and crowdsourcing.  Some of these work well, and others not so much.

My least favorite crowdsourced image displays are at Photo.net which encourages viewers to assign a value from 1 to 7 to pictures, and then they show you the highest rated ones.  What that produces is a lot of technically perfect examples of motel art.

A much better result from a cooperative winnowing process comes from the Gallery Picks feature at the Rangefinder Forum site.  Each week, site visitors are encouraged to pick their favorites from the picture uploads to the site's galleries.  The results from this choice process are consistently excellent.  I think the quality is probably due in part to the demographics of the site's visitors; they share some esthetic values, and there is a remarkable number of skilled photographers who contribute their work to the  Forum's galleries.

I also think that the Gallery Picks benefit greatly from limiting the choices to pictures posted in the foregoing week.  The pictures one finds there have a strength and freshness to them that one seldom encounters in similar collections.  In fact, a recently established thread that permits selecting all-time favorites is much less successful in my opinion.  It seems that what sticks in peoples' minds over a longer time period tends toward the bizarre and the accidental.  Of course, this is a subjective judgment which I'm sure some Forum viewers would contest, but there is a pretty clear difference which arises between selections made over a week's time and those in which the time constraint is absent.