First off, let me state this: there’s nothing wrong with being an amateur photographer at all. In fact, I think it’s wonderful that you’re that much into your hobby and I hope you appreciate the artistic side of it moreso than the technical war of black vs red checker pieces. The biggest sign that you’ve advanced as a photographer, however, is more than putting everything just on social media. It’s with actually having a centralized website that makes a statement about who you are and the work that you do.
If you’re talking about your work with me, I don’t want to need to do in-depth searches to find what you’re talking about in your portfolio. More importantly, I don’t think that your portfolio is your Instagram page. While I think that Instagram and social media can do great things, you’re watering down your work for an attention economy that won’t favor you.
Now, realize what I’m saying here, and please understand the words that are in front of you. Nowhere in this article have I called you a bad photographer or an illegitimate one. Truly, we’ve featured tons of photographers on here who are amateur and semi-professional photographers. But those who take their work the most serious are the ones who build themselves websites. And the biggest tell-tale sign that a photographer is an amateur is with only posting to social media.
Why is that the case? Because your entire library is then dependant on an attention economy. That’s not photography — that’s content creation and the two are very different.
Photography, when practiced as an art form, is based on expression of oneself and doesn’t care for what an algorithm says about their work.
But let’s not constantly repeat the same thing over again. It’s not helpful — but what is helpful is an understanding of what you should put on your website. That starts with understanding your creative and photographic identity. If you’re a portrait photographer, and all you’re doing is putting scans of the Polaroids you shoot in an endless feed, you’re telling me that you don’t care about your pictures. If you organize them and put them into specific portfolios on your website, then you’re telling me how much you care about your work — especially when you keep it updated.
Social media is the buffet of photography — it puts out a ton of stuff designed for bulk sales and encourages people to take what they want and however much they want. A website is a special curation of a few things that they do best — it’s a place that takes their craft far more seriously. Like a buffet, it’s a nice time to be able to pick and choose things or try things. But when you’re ready to commit to more, then you get a website for yourself.
More importantly, with a website, you can control what services scrape your website and how they’re used. Meta and other social media services use your photos to feed their AI. But you can tell bots to not search for your website and add the photos to AI. You ultimately have more control and maintain your copyrights a whole lot easier.
This article isn’t sponsored at all — instead it’s designed for photographers to actually wake up, update their websites, etc. The people who really care will look at your website and not necessarily your social media outlets.