quite amazing...

that one day of burning folders from an aging fw400 drive so that it can be "sanitized" ... and donated or whatever ...

and i didn''t see that digital railroad is ... gone the way so many other services have gone...

investors are scared and pull their money.

the big syndicators don't like services like drr or photoshelter.  i'm not going to name-names.  nope.  they really don't like people who self-syndicate.  who are the they?  well ... you can figure it out.  in fact, i'm not really talking to the hobbyists but perhaps the people who make photos for a living.

i actually know quite a few people who use (used) drr.  i feel bad for them.

not only but these c*nts gave their customers only 24 hours to archive their stuff?  um ... i wonder how the ceo and other officers at drr did?  wonder if they got their paychecks?  probably so.  wonder if they could have forgone the paychecks and kept the service up for at least another week?  i mean ... i wasn't a customer but i really liked their model.

seems like anything on the web can appear overnight ... and disappear just as fast.

i mean ... how fucking hard can it be to figure out a good site?  honestly, i don't think flickr does "viewing" your work correctly.  nor do i think dA does it right.  even more honestly, i don't even think uber did it right.

i think it's time to say fuck you to corporations which really don't give a fuck about the individual and start some other photo site.  i think it could only work if it were started by a collective group of like-minded people ... and funded by subscriptions. 

kind of like dA but not quite.

perhaps with admins (photographically-speaking, of course) who actually are respected photographers among their peers ... not just ... well ... whatever they currently are.

i think certain people owe it to certain other people to really look at something like this.

-a place to post photos.
-a place to comment.
-a place where photos are rated.
-a place not fucking owned by yahoo or google or whatever.

as much as i like certain people at dA ... i can't ever go back to the level of participation i had back in the day.

i kinda think invitation-only would be cool ... so that wanks don't overpopulate with their stellar landscape work. ;)

dunno.

seems that even the web has gone the way of main street:  it's mom-and-pop business have gone the way of best buy and big box businesses.

who .. don't give fuck-one about customer service.

ever try to return something at fry's or best buy? 

and much like the photo industry ... especially that of the behemoth syndicators ... customer service has gone out the fucking window.  i know.  i hear the stories from the very loyal clients. 

the bigger the business ... customer service just ...

sucks.

anyway ... just thought i'd say that.

hopefully, at least one person this was aimed at ... got what i was talking about.

forgot i had to work tonight. :(

so ... it changes the way i was going to spend my day.

hope you're all well and not in jeopardy of losing your job or your house or your archive to corporate-c*nts.

cheers from the stil-warm-l.a.!

-chris

Comments

[Clayton Hauck]

wow. 24 hours. wow.

[Thorsten Overgaard]

You're right.

[Robert Price]

Hey Chris I get what you are saying. And you are right. But at the same time can it ever work. Corporate america has us little guys by the nut sack. You can't do or buy shit with out corporate america fucking ya. To bad about DRR going the UBER way. Kinda sucks to see so many good dot coms dissappear.

I wish Another "uber" would come along. It was a great think and encouraged involvement too. DA I wont use, flicker I use but it sucks ass and I have to pay for it. What is left I could host my own site but that would just cost me even more money too. and who would know with out the publicity and and content syle of the Uber.

Sad day for us all my good friend.

[Dan Powell]

Did you have a specific format for a photography website in mind, or are you just waiting for something that amazes you? I've been kind of annoyed with dA's format.. could be much easier.. I wonder if I threw together a rough sketch that enough people liked that we could find someone who could actually make a website.

I think the best site would be one where photos can be viewed large instantly, or you can customize your viewing options. Another thing is that if it's invite-only, then you could potentially require submitted images to have a set pixel width which might be very convenient for viewing purposes. And maybe the comments or notifications of other people submitting new work could be an invisible menu that can pop out of the side on command of a right-click-drag like when you're navigating Gmail online.

The most important part is definitely the submission process though. It's the reason my photoblog hasn't been updated in a while - I usually host the images at imageshack and then copy/paste the direct links into the post writing form, which takes forever. Maybe that could be a different right-click-drag option that pops out a submit window -- or! I guess it's an and/or, but you could maybe have a clean, simple program on your desktop that allows you to submit photos without using your web browser.

Whatever it is, I think the most important thing is being able to do as much as possible without navigating away from the page you're on. I always end up opening billions of tabs which is really time-consuming, but it's the fastest way to view full-size images.

Have you tried using PicLens? That's actually quite cool.. maybe there's some way to have that in the website instead of full-screen on top of everything else.

Anyway.. just a couple ideas. I'd like to know what you think about it.

[Christian Rollinson]

i'm in jeopardy of most fucking things, but at least i have the archive in a ring bound folder ;) yes, subscription seems to be the way for a site, nothings free. you pay and you feel part of a club, and participate so you get your moneys worth. if people feel they're gonna be a part of something special, they'll pay. the one thing i liked about deviantart but we didn't have at uber was constructive critisism, probably because there wasn't the dump a card mentality at uber, i think most people considered their posts, but i used to enjoy trawling new photographers stuff at deviantart and giving tips and advice. whats the saying, 'those who can, do, those who can't, write about it' ;)

[Ovi]

I've been taking a look at artlimited, for sometime now, but my serious photos never seen the net! dunno why i just don't feel inspired uploading something i think some may "like"(did not say steal, just "like") but there is nothing online that is well built! NOTHING! I liked uber for the blog part... nothing more!

Plus:

A place where people living the real life and real photographers can share their personal view! I might even say not invite only but where you have to submit a portfolio in order to demonstrate you know what we are talking about and so on..

There are way too many variables to consider but it could be an interesting thing to think of! A place where you can search for canon gear and see real results not friggin photos of heads in filthy white balanced photos at some photo show in a place god forgot of!

Dunno...

Said this, I gotta go to bed!

Cheers to my boss for the money! ;)

[Isaac]

Luckyly I´m not in jeopardy of losing my job... anymore, a week and a half late for that ;)

Well, I´d been thinking for some time now of ways to make photography part of the income... talk about a jump start ;)

[pedribeiro]

Have you ever tried www.fotoblur.com?
It is still a bit in the shadow, but maybe that's a good thing. ;)

[elinor]

there are some opensource software packages that would probably allow something like this to be done inexpensively.

i just discovered that flickr has slideshows. i didn't know.

by studying the desirable and undesirable aspects of sites, you could probably come up with a list of necessary features.

it would be impossible for me to go back to the same level of participation i once had on da, too. photography is dead there, in my opinion. there are people i also like there, but they are mostly on facebook, etc.

browse popular on da and the reason why invitational participation might be cool becomes immediately apparent to you.

[Rich Mattingly]

A subscription-driven, invitation-only (permanent beta cum google?) site is the best way to go. Sure, it will become somewhat popularity and clique-driven the way any semi-social "web 2.0" (lame term) site becomes, but at the same time - so is the real world professional photographic community. I think the wedding photog/excellent businessman Becker is trying this with his "[b]school" website for wedding and portrait photographers, minus the invitation-only part. It would take a pretty significant groundswell to get enough users to get going...but I bet there are enough talented people still networked from DA/flikr/uber et al to actually do it.

I stopped using DA entirely because it turned into a joke synonymous with its front page "art" that I didn't want linked to what I currently do photographically to make a living.

Too true on your comment about so-called administrators. Have you looked at "Fotoblur" - I glanced when it was mentioned on DA some time ago, but haven't given it much of a look since...

[Darren Abate]

Ironically, I was at a bar – dealing with an extremely shitty weekend – when I got an email on my iPhone that said DRR was shutting down. I got this message, of course, because PPI was hosted on DRR. Lovely.

[JD Gervais]

I for one would pay just to visit a site like you mentioned... even if I wasn't allowed to post.

It's hard to learn anything when all the feedback you get is: "wow nice photo"... that's pretty much all you get on DA...

[Brian Webb]

I hear you on the website thing...it's kind of a catch 22, tho. I mean, it's easy to put something out there. For the cost of a McDonalds meal a month you can have your idea on the web. The problem is that if it "works" then you need to invest a ton more $$$ (from where?) to keep up with the traffic costs and feature demands from users.

I registered a couple domains the other day and am working on something slowly but making it very "niche" as to not draw a huge amount of traffic but a small amount of related work. If anyone here is interested or has any suggestions drop me an email or something...I hope to have it live within a couple of weeks. It's very street photo-centered.

[Shane Leonard]

Chris,

You're right -- it would be awesome if there was a place that was more facilitating for photographers and not for pushing fucking stuffed plush dolls. It sucks, to be sure, but I'm not sure it would be totally easy to get away from -- that taint of corporations. Still, the fact I had to write that makes me want a place like that all the more. And, if your example ever gets off the ground, I'd be psyched to support the hell out of it, and hopefully be included on the Invite List anyway!

Great point about the assholes who could have forgone their weekly check to keep a service going for a bit more notice, too. I can't imagine being a customer of a site like that which closed so quickly without a chance to back up my shit. I feel badly for the customers of a place like that.

-Shane

[james jay]

id pay for a service like that. thats kinda why i never really payed for a da membership, i like flickr but at the same time it doesn't feel right sometimes.

-james

[zabong]

Uber was cool for me because the artists that were in it.

I'd like a new Uber-like site, too. Would work on it for free a few hours a week - but then, what do I know about setting up a scalable web site up?

24 hours - that sucks.

[Michael]

a photography-startup. interesting idea.

[Philip "flipo"]

Creating a Community/Artgroup (I hate that word) would be awesome but it should be possible to apply for membership from time to time after a core group of members has been invited and things are running.

I personally like the system behind http://www.behance.net for example.

[Dan]

Sounds like a really good idea.
If it ever comes to fruition, something about the invitations should definitely be that they should have a recommendation by more than one person (maybe five or so).
That way someone doesn't join and, thinking their girl/boy/bestfriend is the next HCB, sends them an invite.
Cue 278 MySpace portraits.

But yeah, dA bothers me now.
Never liked Flickr.
And Blogspot takes ages to format a page.

[Adam Kozlowski]

Chris,

I didn't know DRR. But even so, i'm still amazed how the financial crisis is touching those small web services. I mean... Websites or web-based services are so cheap to maintain. That's why it scares me to think what some real companies are going through these days in the US. And it scares me even more to think about my family's company if the crisis would ever strike Europe with similar strength.

My dad started the company over 17 years ago. We employ sometimes almost a 100 people. It isn't particularly profitable, as the printing business is such a competitive arena nowadays, but we have some employees that are with us for more than 10 years now and the general climate is very family-like... We don't own the area where we are located, we rent it. A year ago i was a strong advocate of buying out the place or buying sth else. This year, this very month, if we took a credit in swiss franks (most popular currency to take credit in here) we'd probably go bankrupt. Credit rates and currency exchange rates rocketed this month to levels unseen in the last few years.

It's not a tragedy when you go bankrupt if your company is just you and your wife. It's a tragedy if the company employs a lot of people and all of them lose their jobs, and many of them are too old or too narrowly qualified to look for another job. It's a huge responsibility and only this month i realized it so well.

Anyway... back to photography - i'm all pro. An invitation-only, subscription-based service? All the way! Count me in. I personally don't have too much knowledge on creating such complex websites, but i have friends here that do, gotta ask them how they would approach this subject.

All i know is that from the point of view of viewing photos and commenting them - for me the dA engine was the cleanest and simplest, especially back in the old days. Obviously, now that dA is flocked with emo fanboys and teens with shitty cameras, it's hard to be involved, i don't really look outside my current friends list.

I liked the Uber blogs but i disliked how the gallery view was organized, too small, too CoverFlow'ish. Facebook? It's a fun site, i love it, but photography-wise it's just horrible. Flickr? Aaaargh... I hate it. So sluggish and the photos are so small. And the general design of the site... it feels so ADHD, i don't like websites for which i need a fucking manual. I like stuff simple, big, intuitive. The less Flash, the less general graphics, the better.

[Tanczos Andras]

I didn't really like the gallery function of uber, I think it could have been a bit more practical. Though, it was free and easily customisable which I really liked. It was a great site to blog/make a portfolio at, but unless you put al your work in differrent slideshow it pretty much sucked as a gallery.

'-a place not fucking owned by yahoo or google or whatever.'
I totally second that. I don't think there will be an ideal place to blog/make a portfolio at until some REAL photographers team up and make a site.

btw, was the contest cancelled? seems like a reasonable option

[Rastislav]

For sure its a great idea, wouldn’t mind paying for a site like that. Especially if its managed by people who understand the needs. A site for photographers by photographers... can’t see how it owuld fail.

[John Williams - KrasH]

Being a deviantART member from pretty much its inception, I no full well what you are talking about when you say back in the day. It was a community, plain and simple, not a site made to make money for useless ego tripping ass hats.

We so need something new.

[Arthur Mola]

very interesting idea ... and i agree, we need a good place to post photos, receive comments, post blogs, etc. and i like the idea of invite only ...

sucks about drr!

[Ken Z.]

Too bad about UBER...was a great place...DA w\o the cheesy anmie "art"
and grade-school attitudes.Miss your blogs and artwork.
Let me know of you post anywhere else...wonderful photos and a "down-under" attitude were refreshing/annoying/uplifting(sometimes all at the same time;-))in a world of wanna-be's and wankers most extraordinary.

Send our love to C,J,M and all.
LTR,
Ken and Margaret Z.
(formerly of Uber)