For those of you who don’t know, 500px is a photo sharing site aimed at photographers. A bit like Flickr used to be like but with a few little twists.
I wasn’t intending to join another photo sharing site. I’d made my peace with Flickr and had started posting again. I joined 500px purely to take advantage of their portfolio service. The photo sharing and marketplace communities were just ‘things that came attached to the portfolio’.
I joined 500px in late November, and immediately posted a load of photos to use in my portfolio. Curious, I took a peak at the community pages and I soon became hooked. With Flickr, you get more photo views if you have lots of followers, comment on friend’s photos, and post in the right groups. It takes time, but I enjoyed the community feeling, and always kept a weather eye on my photo stats. I was quite happy to upload entire sets in one go, and gradually give the best ones exposure by sharing in groups. 500px is a bit different. For a start, most people post one photo per day, maximum.
Every photo goes onto a ‘fresh’ photostream and in the first few minutes will be seen by a fair few people. If enough people like (vote for) your photo is becomes ‘upcoming’ and gets even more views. Photos with 80 points become ‘popular’ and the real goal is to get a photo with a high enough score to get onto the top of the Popular photostream. The more points you have, the harder your photo has to work – the first Like will get you about 30 points, while you need many likes to move from, say, 97 to 98 points.
The actual points you get per like depends on lots of things, including how active you are on the site, and photographers who use gaming tactics (to get more likes) are penalised. After 24 hours your pulse score (total points) is handicapped. This is to stop the same photos staying at the top of the Popular stream.
I soon felt disappointed that my early photos had such low scores. This was because I uploaded them in batches, so they didn’t make it into the Fresh photostream. I ended up deleting loads and have been re-uploading them, one at a time. I was a very happy bunny when my first photo made it to Popular.
It’s a great buzz when you post a photo you are really proud of and lots of other photographers agree, but 500px has to come with some health warnings. People are viewing lots of small photos, and scrolling down quickly, so photos that stand out from a crowd always get more votes. My beloved London street shots (eventually I’ll share them here) never got out of Fresh, and I now only post street photos if I want to put them in my portfolio. I’ve also posted photos from the same shoot, and scratched my head that one will get stuck in Fresh, then the next day a lesser photo will make it to Popular.
The other health warning is that, unlike Flickr, a lot of explicit photography is posted without being marked ‘adult content’. Some of it is tasteful, most of it is not. I’ve managed to filter most of this out of my streams, but am missing out on great photos as a result.
An unexpected benefit is that 500px is helping me to become a better photographer. There are some amazing photos on 500px, and I am feeling really inspired to take better shots myself. I am also much more critical of my own work, only choosing the best ones to share. Here is the photo that 500px members think is my best photo so far. I’m still working through my back catalogue, so I hope to be posting even better shots in the coming months.
Muddy Tracks 