It’s funny, you never know what people are going to like.
As a photographer, you know what you like and what makes a good photograph technically speaking, but in the end will people like it? If you’re a professional, will people pay for it?
I put some photos up on a website called ViewBug this time last year. On this site other photographers, amateur and professional, can give you peer awards for the ones that appeal to them the most.
I was pretty sure which of the images on my ViewBug profile were the best ones and I waited to see the votes and awards roll in on those. They were all neck and neck for a while, but then some started to pull ahead — not the ones I thought should pull ahead but others that I’d never considered.
I thought this one would do well. In the end, it did OK but it wasn’t outstanding.
To me, this next one was a throwaway shot. But it garnered the most awards by far. ViewBug even invited me to do a blog post about the shot! That shows how much I know!
So the lesson was that I shouldn’t second guess someone else’s tastes. Show ALL your best and let them pick the ones they like.
So today I took a leaf out of Dallas photographer JB Sallee’s book and posted the same picture on Facebook in black-and-white and in color and asked for opinions. I’m not going to say what the result was in the Facebook tally but I AM going to ask you for your opinion.
Color?
Or black-and-white?
Thanks for your opinion and you’ll all be able to see any contributions in the comments below.
