Smashing article over at drawar.com on how the Web is being polluted by copycats that simply copy each other’s lists. You know, the 10 best this and 40 awesome that. Believe it or not, it works, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. There is no original content, simply a rehash of some one else’s work.
The tutorials at Photoxels are written from a first person basis. This means that we research the technique, practice it until we get pretty good at it (we don’t pretend to “master” it) or keep reading and asking questions until we understand it enough, and only then do we write it up. We find that this way we teach better, clearer, and others seem to find this is so.
It is simply too easy to lift off someone else’s work, rewrite it a bit, and publish it whether you understand it or not — or whether you can yourself practice the technique or not — and illustrate the tutorial with loads of pretty pictures from Flickr or tumblr or some other gallery — none of which is the work of the tutorial author. All these tutorials are good for is lunchtime reading. And boy, do people just swallow this whole! Come to think of it, that is how many of the photography magazines used to be. And that is why I never learnt anything of practical value from them.
The Web is different. If you challenge yourself to get off the list wagon, and start searching for the real gem on the Web, you’ll find them. There are photographers who are really good at their craft and who are willing to share that knowledge with “padiwans” like us if we are willing to put forth the effort to learn. That’s the rub, isn’t it. It’s not instant gratification. Everyone wants the “best” digital camera and the setting that will help us take pictures like in the tutorials we see. And marketers feast on that desire by constantly delivering “intelligent” and “smart” features that promise but rarely fully deliver. The digital camera, no matter how technologically advanced, remains, in the final analysis, only a tool.
But no one said it better than Kodak, “eons” [or so it seems] ago, when it claimed that all we had to do is, “Press the shutter and our camera does the rest.”
Funny how, in this digital age, that same marketing message is still being pushed out with different dressings. Our grandparents bought into it, our parents also, we did, and now we sadly see our children spend their [our?] hard earned money to buy the message, the promise, the need to satisfy some inner spiritual hunger.
Truth is, we all like lists. We like it when someone else has done the work for us, scouring the Web for the best and summarizing it for us. We like lunchtime reading. We like someone else to tell us which digital camera is the best ( Photoxels Gift Guide – Best Digital Cameras 2009. Oh wait, I forgot to give number! ), we have forgotten how to thnk for ourselves. You will see more lists on Photoxels — but of really useful stuff, stuff that we have tried ourselves first to prove they work.
“As seen on TV!” used to mean “junk.” Now they have stores called that!
There is an element of pride when others start quoting us or putting our links out and referring to us as some kind of experts. Many people take advantage of that (ain’t it funny that so many want to teach you how to make money on the Web?) but it just makes us more somber, more responsible, more aware that every tutorial we put out better be good, substantiated and tried, tested and proven.
[ Read the article at: drawar.com ]