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This is the blog for professional photographers, and those who aspire to be. Our aim is to help professional photographers build long-term, sustainable careers.
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Now you’re doing your own publishing, you have more to concern yourself with than the quality of your images.
Of course people will judge you by those. You do so yourself.
But they’ll also judge you by your writing, your tone of voice, your graphic design sensibilities.
Plenty of people will judge you because you don’t know how to use apostrophes, or when to use i before e.
These days plenty more will judge you for not re-reading before you publish, and so not noticing how predictive texting has messed up your sentences.
Neither you nor I have a professional sub-editor polishing our stuff, so the occassional srcew-up is OK. Although my spellchecker caught both those.
Click the photo for more about someone else's embarrassing mistake.
Cheers, Ian
PS I defer to my betters over graphic design, simply because they're better than me. There's no shame in knowing your limits and asking for advice.
PPS Metro magazine in Auckland had a column called "Srcew-ups" for years. Maybe they still do.
Ian Baugh
on
June 6, 2012, 5:19 am
said:
Good comment, Stephen. My point was not to be judgmental myself, of course. But it does look like you proof-read this ;-).
Photographers have a slightly bigger problem in that there is no equivalent of the spell checker for tacky images. Which doesn't stop people making fun of them: http://youarenotaphotographer.com/
Stephen Baugh
on
June 7, 2012, 8:57 am
said:
Oh I didn't take it as judgmental, it's just reality. Some people notice things that others don't, and some care about those things a lot.
My point was to say that when you know you make these mistakes it sometimes knocks your confidence.
It's important to get past the confidence issue, and if required use other people/services to support ones weaknesses as required.
Stephen Baugh
on
June 6, 2012, 11:10 am
said:
As the embarrassing speller of the family, and someone who can destroy a great idea with poor sentence structure, this post impacts me emotionally more than most.
Something in my head just doesn't click, and when it could my brain is 3-4 words ahead of what I am writing. I don't mean to be careless, I certainly don't mean to be disrespectful to the reader, I just don't see the mistakes. On a bad day it makes me feel stupid.
So does that mean I should stop writing? I think the answer is NO, but if the main criteria for going to hell is the inability to proofread then I have a one way ticket.
I should write, and in fact Twitter and Facebook etc demand it. In a social media environment the timeliness of a post is as important as the content. A well written tweet 3 days later isn't effective as it's out of context and peoples attention is elsewhere.
What it does mean for me is that I'm not going to apply for any jobs as a writer and I know my limitations. For anything significant I get someone to proofread it for me and I always leave the final review to the experts.
In an ironic way, that's how our services work for photographers too. These photographers take wonderful images, but either don't get or don't like post production. They don't see when images are out of alignment or the colour is wrong but that's no reason for them to stop telling stories through great photos.
formerfatguy
on
June 8, 2012, 1:08 am
said:
now THATS funny
Ian Baugh
on
June 6, 2012, 5:20 am
said:
And then there's this: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
