[debaser]

I would like to get a lot more honest critique on my blog. My style is changing and I'm sort of lost...some good critiques (art-school style, brutal ass critiques) would be helpful.

But it's weird. I asked a friend who's a great artist and is someone I've known since before college to stop by and select five images from my site for an honest critique. This guy -- one of my best friends in the world -- did stop by but only looked and commented on the first two images he saw, which weren't particularly good ones. Nobody has any time.

I'd like to have more comments of all kinds and more traffic in general, but the fact is if you want to achieve that, you have to put in a lot of work. I have a job already. In fact I used to shoot professionally and quit because art shouldn't feel like work. Photoblogging should be about the enjoyment of it.

I guess there are just too many photoblogs out there, and to stand out you have to put in some ground work. I barely have time for photographing at all the last few months, and even less to do that kind of networking that would probably only result in MM comments anyway. I don't even have enough time to check out the photographers that I like and comment on their work.

That said, if you join that photoblogs.org and get on that hotlist for a while, you will get some traffic and maybe some of that will be meaningful traffic. That's what happened after I launched my blog. Then it dropped off the hotlist and once you're buried on that site, you're buried.

I used to use photo.net for photo critique, but that crowd seems a lot more interested in the sharpness of the lenses than anything else. There's no real appreciation for the direction I'm taking my work in.

So I'm not sure, but thanks for providing a thread to vent in.