Suggestion to "Reaction to Photographs"

summerkl

Veteran
Location
Vancouver, Canada
Name
Kevin
Friends, Romans, Countrymen .. lend me your ears - forgive me I was flashing back to grade 6 when I made that speech in the school play.

I am very fond of the SC forum and having read through retow's thread would like to suggest adding more structure to the photo side of this forum. This is not a new idea and is shamelessly copied from another forum.

We could have a weekly best image gallery. It would involve a panel selecting the best/favorite photos posted to the site that week from all of the threads. This is not an open vote but rather a panel of 3 to 5 picking up to ten of their favorites that week. Here is a link to the latest weekly gallery ... they are on their 234th week! Dyxum Exhibition #234 - Dyxum forums - Page 1

I have found it very helpful for learning, community bonding, and reward/recognition. Plus it's just fun :)

In order to address the time burden placed on a panel, I would suggest that the panel be on a rotating volunteer basis. Or members could put their names into the volunteer pool and one of the administrators could select/assign those members for the week.

To add some more context to my suggestion, I'm a bit of a goal-oriented fellow so I set myself a challenge to get one of my photos selected for the weekly gallery. A welcome byproduct of this goal was the curing of my GAS - I am taking more photos and obsessing less about camera specs. PS I managed to achieve my goal :)

Ramble completed :redface:
 
I like the sounds of it, too, Kevin. Let's see what happens over the weekend and into next week. If enough are up for it, I'm sure we can figure out a way to spread the responsibilities across the board and am thinking it might be a great addition to our ongoing Weekly Challenge and something new for 2012. :drinks:
 
Kevin, it would be wonderful if you might give us some ideas of how you see the setup of this working. And please, everyone else, let's hear your thoughts, as well. We need to keep things as simple as possible.

How is it set up on the Dyxum forum? As in how do people volunteer and how is the weekly challenge organized? Have you ever been on the volunteer panel? Do we want it to be weekly or would it be better to stretch it out to a longer time frame, bearing in mind that we do have our own Weekly Challenge?

Any and all thoughts welcome!
 
Suggestion

This sounds like a good idea.
I would imagine it would be a fair amount of work for the committee.
Since there already is a weekly challenge. Perhaps starting with a monthly collection/selection of 4-10 would be more manageable.
Keep Eager.
JH
 
Sounds like a good idea but also a very difficult idea to implement.

First, as JH noted this would be a lot of work. Someone would need to keep track of all posted images and make sure all committee members saw all images. Those individuals would then have to spend a lot of time emailing and PMing to reach decisions. While there might be one or two standout images, picking image 3 and image 4 might be more challenging especially since we could assume that the individuals making the decisions have different views on what constitutes a good image. Also, the only way to make this work is if the committee members were honest enough with each other to explain exactly why they prefer some images over others, getting into a level of criticism that not all will be comfortable with, especially if you have a committee with no fixed membership.

The other issue I foresee is that we have a much smaller user base than a site like Dyxum and far fewer images posted here, so there would be fewer people to be involved and fewer images to choose from.

A monthly selection might be more realistic from the point of view of the numbers involved and perhaps you could have a guest 'judge' each month: one member who gets to choose his or her favourites for that month and explain why. Though that again presupposes that the person involved or someone is tracking all the posted pictures.
 
Thank you, Bill - and Olli, your points are very good ones. The idea of a having a guest "judge" or "picker" or "decider" ;) each month might well be the way to go. As has been noted, this is going to involve a great deal of tracking by the volunteer/s. One idea might be that we have a Monthly thread in which every member who wishes to participate adds a hyperlink to the photos they have posted for the month in question. This will require efforts from each member but would allow the volunteer who is presiding for said month to be sure to see each photograph. :popcorm2:
 
Over at dyxum.com, they have a regular panel of reviewers who rotate on some basis the duty of weekly gallery selection. I am not sure of their criteria for selection but it is likely weighted towards composition, creativity, and originality. They are serious non-compact users :)

For the SC forum, I would imagine

1 - selection criteria is more casual - I used the phrase "favorite" as well as "best" giving room for the panel to be flexible with their choices. However, if the forum feels it should be more rigid to encourage "better" photos, whatever that means, that's good too.

2 - commentary on selected image is desired but not necessary. When the weekly results are posted, comments can be posted by all members, panel and "winners"

3 - voting panel - I could see this as a time burden so I thought the panel could be chosen weekly by the administrator from a pool of volunteers. This is one reason the image selection criteria should be casual as the volunteers will have varying levels of experience.

4 - panel responsibilities - pick 5-10 images from the week posted in the Image Threads and submit the selections to the administrator. This assumes there is a relatively easy way to identify what images are new that week. There is the simple brute force method of looking at all the threads but I am hoping there is a technical member who knows how this can be done via an algorithm.

5 - administrator responsibilities - assign the panel for the week, tally the selections, apply the tiebreak procedure, notify the "winners" and open the thread. As to tiebreaks, in the interest of expediency, the admin could select from the ties to fill out the weekly total.

6 - frequency - I am thinking weekly because if there are a lot of images then it is easier for the panel to review than a full month of images. Maybe bi-weekly but monthly feels too infrequent.

7 - additional options: periodic weekly themes - B&W week, 50mm week, landscape week, etc.,
 
I am not sure we really need this here, we already have a Photo Critique section, do we really want to have more completions, and don’t we have enough of that everyday. If one wants comments on your image posts, just write I would really like feedback on this or that image.
While the idea of theme postings can be fun, I really do not think we need to pick a winner, each week or month, group discussion and dialogue seems to me a better way to help the forum grow photographically, more so than a rotating committee of judges.
The other open option is to be direct and ask the forum members with say more experience for feedback or help with PMs. I am sure many of us have no problem helping or giving advice.
 
Just to be clear, I don't envision this as a competition. I used the term "winner" because it was too wordy to type weekly recognized photo recipient.

The selected photos are chosen from postings throughout the forum. I don't know the statistics for image postings so I'm just making assumptions about frequency.

If there aren't many photos then obviously this suggestion sucks :)


I am not sure we really need this here, we already have a Photo Critique section, do we really want to have more completions, and don’t we have enough of that everyday. If one wants comments on your image posts, just write I would really like feedback on this or that image.
While the idea of theme postings can be fun, I really do not think we need to pick a winner, each week or month, group discussion and dialogue seems to me a better way to help the forum grow photographically, more so than a rotating committee of judges.
The other open option is to be direct and ask the forum members with say more experience for feedback or help with PMs. I am sure many of us have no problem helping or giving advice.
 
, group discussion and dialogue seems to me a better way to help the forum grow photographically, more so than a rotating committee of judges.
The other open option is to be direct and ask the forum members with say more experience for feedback or help with PMs. I am sure many of us have no problem helping or giving advice.

As I see it, summerkl's suggestion was prompted by retow's thread , where he expressed concern at the lack of dialogue about imagemaking he perceived in the forum ... if we would like a community that has free-flowing discussions about making pictures, and plenty of them, restricting ourselves to asking for direct C&C on particular images, in threads or via PM, may not be the best way of achieving that.

I do like the idea of fostering a spirit of discussion and recognition here, and while I have my reservations a la Olli, I also think we need to "try and dare" ... otherwise there's a danger that the community might (for instance) fall into stagnancy, where a couple of dozen of us post images regularly to the applause of the the others and everybody else talks about gear ...
 
Perhaps someone...Kevin... Should start a poll. Post it for a week and see how many are really interested. The questions should be obvious.
A brief opening statement explaining the idea should be on the first post.
Give it a week and see where things are at.

Then decide if it's a go or not. Set up a thread and get the ball rolling.
First step is a measure of interest.
The poll will give a result.
Don
 
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