Does your quantity of forum posts correlate to quantity of photos on Photo.net?

<p>I have had this suspicion for a while that those folks who are the most vocal on forums don't have many photographs to Photo.net. I decided to test this hypothesis the other day by doing an exhaustive survey of all Photo.net users who where currently online (Community->Who's online?). This random sampling of Photo.net users yielded some interesting results. My hypothesis was generally correct with a trend that most closely resembles a inverse power relationship. Not that surprising, but still interesting!</p>

<p>Again in jpg</p><div></div>

<p>Why do you think people don't have photos online? Could be like me, I use film and print in a darkroom. Scanning is a pain, esp an 11x14 print on a legal size scanner, so yup only a few photos, and those are mostly from minilab scans during processing before I started doing C41 processing at home.</p>

<p>Plus your "who is online" stats could be rather skewed, as quite likely you are counted as online if you never log off.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Danny, does your survey take into account an individual's numbers of "Comments on Gallery Photos"? <br>

<br>

I think those who post more pictures tend to be more involved in the critique forum to the exclusion of other forums, with exceptions, of course. <br>

<br>

If you look at the drop-down listing of forums, most tend to be gear and technique oriented which might also explain your observation - they are more How-To oriented and have less to do with the quality of pictures.</p>

<p>Another confusing factor may be that a photo posted to the No Words forum counts as a posting whereas it is actually a posted photo.</p>

<p>Also there is a practical top end size to a portfolio after which it becomes too many to take in. I have 219 photos posted at the moment but will delete some old ones when I post to keep the total about the same. So the vertical axis tends to have an automatic limit except for a few people while there is a much larger spread for the horizontal axis.</p>

<p>Does anybody care anyway?</p>

How are you determining the "number of photographs on photo.net"? I only have 35 photos uploaded in my photo.net portfolio, but I many hundreds more posted to threads. Also, the majority of photos that I have posted online are not on photo.net.

<p>I'd bet Danny's hypothesis would withstand scrutiny if more complete data were available. The discussion forums and gallery display/critique sections have always been very different, unique and equally vibrant and essential elements of photo.net.</p>

<p>There's some crossover but in the long run the lack of photos uploaded to photo.net portfolios from the most active members in discussion forums is no more relevant than the lack of discussion forum input from the most prolific photographers and active participants in the critiques/ratings, at least in terms of evaluating quality of participation.</p>

<p>Also, we have no convenient way to quantify the participation in photo sharing threads in the discussion forums. Some of the most talented and prolific photographers who participate on photo.net often upload photos to "No Words/Words" type threads, but have few or no photos uploaded to their portfolio spaces. They may prefer to retain greater control of their own photos by using their own websites, personally owned servers or cloud type hosting.</p>

<p>IOW, anecdotally interesting but inconclusive.</p>

<p>Let's not forget that we have the option to Show/Hide photo folders as well. </p>

<p>Colin, why not move your older photos to a hidden folder instead of culling them? </p>

<p>Michael: no, I didn't take into account things like comments on galleries or individual photos. I was thinking about doing this, but with my brute force method of manually copying data into an Excel sheet, it was just too tedious. I might write some code at one point to crawl this site and get a more complete picture.</p>

<p>Colin and Mike: yes, very good points about in-line photos posted in forums. It is a shame that the are not represented on people's profiles. I am similar in that I have no photos on my profile, but I do have some in forums.</p>

<p>Yes, I agree with you, Lex: the forums and the galleries are both important parts of Photo.net. In no way did I mean for this to be a criticism of people who prioritize galleries/forums; it was more just an interesting confirmation of a hypothesis.</p>

<p>Michael, I usually cull the old photos I think I have outgrown so would prefer to just zap them. By<em> outgrown</em> I mean in a style I would probably no longer use.</p>

<p>I upload sometimes to illustrate a point in discussion, here and on other forums. Also I put family photos on facebook, for a limited number of friends and rels. And I still have a link to a website with a small but dated selection.</p>

<p>I have in the past uploaded to various sites for critique, but don't so much feel the need now. To some extent also I feel internet critique is not representative of real world values, and in any case is dealing with a web view rather than a print. There is also a bit of a feeling that I used to upload if I thought it was good enough to show, and would now upload if I thought it was not good enough to steal. That's an exaggeration, but I do feel, there are many cases of work being hijacked and it does put me off.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>I do not have a portfolio here. I have a thorough work portfolio on line for folks to refer to- which I figure with about 75 images is, on its own, serious overkill. I do not link to it in each post but it's there - but there's no blog, no articles, no rah rah manifesto, no links, nothing to buy...</p>

<p>I sometimes upload an image in a forum thread as a quick example of something.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>I'm with Bob's theory. I shoot digital mainly for casual work, with my more important work being done in the darkroom, or with high MP MF cameras that I don't scale down for web use.</p>

<p><em>I have had this suspicion for a while that those folks who are the most vocal on forums don't have many photographs to Photo.net.</em><br>

I am fairly vocal, have few pictures on photo.net (no interest in camera-club-style competitions or ratings) but have a link to an extensive portfolio at saatchionline.com. What would you have me do?</p>

<p>It's like any kind of endeavor, you have those that like to talk, those that like to "do", and those that like to do both at the same time. Nothing wrong about any of those approaches. </p>

<p>Danny, apart from the comments already made, such as W/NW or in-forum photos not being taken into account, the snapshot at 5PM is just that, and you may get different results at a different time or with an averaged time period result (you are only sampling on-line at one time). Your conclusion may be right, but it may be too specific a time slot to capture an average portrait of the membership.</p>

<p>It would also be interesting to see an expanded scale of all the points grouped near the origins and with the outliers (wild points?) eliminated, as this might give a more distinct plot. I'm not sure how other frequent posters operate, but I usually get involved in discussions for a few weeks, feel satiated with that, and then spend more time off-line photographing and (as has also been said) then posting only a few of those photos. My portfolio is just over a hundred images of disperse themes and approaches, which I consider to be much more than enough, and it should really be trimmed with older images replaced by newer ones.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>I have zero photos uploaded to PN, although you can see much of my work posted in individual threads for illustration purposes. If you want to see all of my work, you have to go to my website. Your hypothesis might be valid, but I think you have to eliminate those who don't have ANY photos posted in PN galleries for whatever reasons. Similarly, you need to eliminate those who have never posted, for whatever reasons. I think you'll find you end up with a lot of scatter, and you might be hard pressed to find statistical significance.</p>

<p>A photo from heading out for a hike. I won't upload to my gallery, but it could fit in the No Words forum.</p><div></div>

<p>Danny, even if your premise is true, so what? What could you say about your observation, other than the fact there may be a correlation? What do you take away from an apparent observation that an individual who makes many forum postings may have relatively few photographs in his/her portfolio?</p>

<p>Also, how do you define and measure "being vocal?" Is it simply the number of forum postings, as you've apparently described, or is it the length and quality of a response? Is saying "great shot!" one hundred times more vocal than offering five multiple-paragraph comments on photos, with each comment referencing specific attributes of the photographs?</p>

<p>Hi Danny - you had to know this post was going to get some interesting responses. I think that people use P.Net for a lot of different purposes. I post enough photos to show that I know which end of the camera to point away from me, but for the most part I don't use this site as any kind of portfolio. I heavily use Picasa and somewhat Flickr, have some photos at Shutterfly and at 500pics, but I don't consider my online posting for the general public to be that important. For me this site is like the photography club I've never been able to find, where the discussion of how to do things, where to go for interesting photography, and yes, what equipment people like is the most important part. </p>

<p>What's this demonstrate? Not that people who write a lot don't also shoot a lot. A lot of people use this site for discussions and other sites for portfolios or sharing. I've got no photos on the gallery here and a few thousand in other gallery locations.</p>

<p>I like prints. That's my interest. </p>

<p>I stopped posting photos after an incident of "theft by right click".</p>

<p>The real question here is what conclusion you draw from your chart. Are you suggesting that the people who spend lots of time pontificating about photography don't actually shoot, while those who really shoot don't have time to mouth off on forums? The data can't support that because not everyone who really shoots posts photos on PN, for a variety of reasons (their images are hosted elsewhere, for example, or they work on film and rarely go to the trouble of scanning and posting online).</p>

<p>It is an interesting post, and there is no reason for assuming Danny is implying anything from it. I see two skewing factors that will make this prone to difficulties though. The first is that I am sure many users have multiple accounts and separate their involvement along those lines. The second is, as this is not a photo post you will only attract comments from the vocals :-)</p>