Photophys.com: The Science of Photography

500px is not like SmugMug, Flickr, etc. It is a place to get immediate feedback on your uploaded images, and to show your work with great colors and resolution. What the founders want is the best of your best and your portfolio of winners. The site was established in Russia a few years ago. It spread across Europe and then around the world. In 2009 it was launched as a business, and it is now based in Toronto. Compared with its competition, it is still small; but it has over 100,000 members and is reported to be growing by 60% a month.

Here is the deal. You can sign up for a free membership and start uploading your photographs. For $50/year (less with a discount code) you get a website and Awesome premium services. About a week ago I signed up for free subscription, and after a few days I upgraded to Awesome. I have not had a chance to play with the portfolio features yet.

This is my experience so far. A newly uploaded photo appears in a minute or so with 19 others on the Fresh page. If it catches any one’s attention, it is viewed and may receive positive or negative votes. Quickly, in only a couple of minutes, the new photos are shifted to page two or three to make way for new uploads. Only a few of the new photos any get votes, and very few get as many as five votes. Some receive comments and are selected for some one’s favorites list. Quickly the photos appear to be lost in the sea of images and don’t get many more views. However, those that do best in the first hours are moved to the Upcoming page where they get many more views, votes, and comments. The first 24 hours seems to determine the rating of any photo.

If you are concerned about the Rating that appears by a photo, you may wonder how fair this procedure is. It is not unfair, but it involves a lot of chance. The time of day a photo is uploaded determines its audience and only a few votes establish the rating. For example, I uploaded a photo of a hummingbird on a branch. It was sharp and colorful. In the first 17 hours it was viewed 15 times, received three “like” votes and got a rating of 50. My highest rating was 85, which is attached to a colorful, iconic geyser scene in Yellowstone N.P. That one was moved to the Upcoming page and finally was viewed 93 times and got 23 votes. It received 11 comments and was put on three favorites list. By the way, this popular geyser photo had failed to be juried into a local photo exhibition.

And what about my images that did not fare well? Here are some examples. I uploaded what I thought was a very good photo of the mating ritual of a pair of waved albatrosses. It has won a local photo competition, but at 500px it was viewed 15 times and got zero votes and a rating of N/A. I suspect the subdued color was not popular. An even more striking example was a black and white image showing a different view of same geyser at Yellowstone that had been very popular the day before. The B&W photo had received high marks at a local competition, and I think it is superior to the colorful one. However on 500px in three days it was viewed three times and got no votes. So what should one do with “unpopular images? I have removed a few; but in other cases, where I know the photo is better than its rating, I leave it up. Actually, the site encourages new uploads and removal of old images by slowly down grading ratings of images with time.

I do have some concerns about the site now and in the future. There is nude content, the viewing of which must be activated by the user. A small fraction of the Fresh images show nudes, but the Upcoming and Favorites have a much higher concentration. Some of this is understandable because the nude art shots tend to be done by professional photographers with models and the quality is often higher than that of most uploads. But I also think the ratings reflect the user base that contains many professionals who take and vote on nude art. I think this distortion of ratings will change as the user base grows. In the meantime, maybe the bar should be set a bit lower for moving Nature, Landscapes, Macro, etc., photographs to the Upcoming page. However, the growth of the user base raises other questions. Can the quality of the users and the images possibly be maintained? Already the average quality of the Fresh uploads is fairly low, and the volume sweeps away good images in just a few minutes. However, I welcome more nature photographers to the community because the site would benefit from more sophisticated voting on landscapes, birds, macro photos, etc.

Those with potential should browse 500px.com (I am at 500px.com/csid36). There is also an interview (audio) with the co-founder Evgeny Tchebotarev in the #208 edition of TWIP.  See: http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/