Another site will be shutting down

photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1530921

Pekka Saarinen the founder of photography-on-the.net has decided to shut things down at the end of 2023.

This is very sad. Some things that he refers to cannot be changed, like growing old; but I wonder if the attraction of the "social media" and the short lifetime of posting and shorter attention span of younger users is really here to stay. Maybe, like vinyl LPs, people will realise the value of fora which dont just require you to "like" in 20 years time and reinvent the "wheel". i am optimistic that this will be so.

Personally I have never been interested in the commercial websites of social media that he lists, but I realise that I am in a minority of approximately one. I am writing this on my PC. Doing so is much faster than on the iPad, where my typing accuracy is around 30%, and impossible for me on an iPhone. Click, click, click with the finger!

David

Sad to see another photographic resource wither on the vine. Interest in photography with dedicated cameras as a pastime seems to be diminishing rapidly at the moment.

I think that photographic equipment manufacturers have let themselves fall asleep. They should have taken better care of the huge clientele they had, which is now rapidly disappearing with each passing day. I'll give two examples: Develop and offer editing software and better explain all the features of the equipment, which is usually complex.
This hobby is very expensive: lenses, bodies, software, computers, monitors, etc. are all expensive. Manufacturers launched new models every year, always more expensive and with few improvements, eventually saturating the market. In short: They killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

On the other hand, it seems that the large manufacturers are selling every camera that they make, and are still in business.

With regard to software, Canon makes (free) DPP software for raw file processing of the output of their cameras, though they do stumble badly by not explaining how to use it!

I can't recall does Canon even mention DPP in the material that comes with new cameras. They do have a DPP manual on their website (I believe), also advanced manuals for the cameras. But how many people actually go that far.....judging by posts on Reddit.....not many.

Canon actually have a Youtube channel too, actually for multiple regions. They actually went over DPP and certain camera models and their features in old videos.

Would it be possible/reasonable to reach out to the owner and offer them a new home? We were in this position several months ago and it's sort of like losing a whole social group at one time. I remember spending hours looking at options for our little band of DPR members to switch to.

That's a bit sh!t. That site is where I've had my longest forum membership by far, right back to my first Canon DSLR. Learned heaps about it from there. Will be sorry to see it go. In saying that, I realised that I post way less frequently there over the last couple of years, than I did previous to that. Just a sign of the times I guess. Things never sit still, and keep on changing. Change or die

The message from the owner of the site starts off with what I perceived (unjustly) as a “bitter” tone. I read it and read it again and I don’t think that he means it to be.

He is correct though: all of these camera forums are filled up with dying old guys. The forum structure/concept has been the same since, what?, pre-1990? He does mention that he has a lot of “older” members on the site and that new ones come (unclear what age) but don’t stay long. That is the key issue to me.

Sites like DPR may be able to soldier on forever or at least a while but that is because it is a forum wrapped in an amazing ecosystem of editorial/technical information - not just “forums”.

As he also points out, digital cameras have changed into incredible devices- they are all amazing. Forums tend to talk about gear/gear wars and, as he says, few are interested in gear when everything is amazing. What I think that he misses is that social media really doesn’t talk much about gear…. It is centered around images: the product, not the hammer.

Anyway, I think that the next 5 years is going to have many dozens of forums, across all sorts of topics, close if the bulk of their user base is old men and the forums are unable to create a platform where younger folks of both genders want to come and participate.

You get, or used to get, a CD with DPP on it, to load onto your computer. When you bought a Canon camera. Was my first introduction to raw processing. I found it pretty easy & intuitive to use, & took me a long time (years) to find anything that I liked better. Great software, for free. It remembered all your in camera settings, & automatically applied them on opening your files. Very very easy to use. No more difficult than shooting jpegs. So I'm not too sure what they could have done differently to be honest.

It was already version 4 by the time I encountered it, and maybe more complicated than when you started with it. I used it a little; but found PL4 better and easier to use.

David

This was one of the forums I looked at when DPR was dying, or when I got one of those bans from a certain arsehole moderator on DPR. It was pretty dead to the world. Who wants to join a dying discussion forum where you get no replies to anything you post? Sure people joined and quickly left. The death of a forum takes on a snowball effect

There are forums like Nikon Café, which seem to soldier along with few members, and Talk Photography seems quite lively. The thing they have in common is that gear talk is a very minor part of the posts they receive. It is all about images or the "non gear aspects" of photography. I see this forum is drifting toward image discussion or display, rather than "gear" posts.

What is there to argue about anymore? All cameras are pretty good at what they do. Fool framers arguing with the M43 small sensor guys about equivalence, gets pretty boring in the end. It was fun for a while.

I do not agree that Facebook and such are killing forums. My son tells me Facebook is for oldies too. Interest in photography has declined after the massive digital camer boom of ten-fifteen years ago. There are signs with the film camera revival, that thre still is a certain interest in the artistic side of photography, using dedicated tools. The Vinyl record revival is a similar sign that people are realising that there is a good quality experience, beyond the cell phone or Spotify.

The best photo resources seem to be surviving (with reduced circumstances) and a lot of chaff has been probably weeded out.

The problem is that my D70 became obsolete pretty quickly, as the Megapixels quickly climbed and climbed in number. A good old D800 from eleven years ago is still a valid photographic tool and I only bought a D850 because I could and because I wanted a camera new out of the box. My Z7 is still pretty good and I have no need or even "want" to upgrade it. This is why the camera industry is slimming down, and this is why less people want to talk and ask questions about their new camera gear.

As far as software is concerned, IMHO most non-pros can do pretty well with just open source software such as Darktable, Rawtherapee or ART, GIMP etc. Personally, the only non-free software I've used since I started with digital photography in 2002 have been Bibble Pro/Aftershot Pro which I abandoned and PixInsight. Edit: And actually RawDigger.

Bit of a stretch to call POTN part of the chaff.

If, as I read, most people are quite satisfied with the photographs that they make with their phones, this is more writing on the wall for the dedicated camera. I see that Leica are hedging their bets. This is old news, but I was not aware of it until this morning. Leica is making high tech lenses for Xaomi phones. See here.

David

In the sense that a lot of resources that have seen better times and were in terminal decline anyway, like POTN are closing. When I was looking for an alternative to DPR, this was just one of the moribund forums I came across.

You don't seem to be comprehending the fact that POTN was not a technical review site. It was simply one of the biggest collections of Canon shooters on the interwebz, posting photos. Which was why I really liked it. It was only quite recently that they expanded their base to include other brands, so if you found that Nikon subforum lacking, that would be the reason why. The rot had already set in, right across the forum landscape. Not just there. Once again, very very difficult to call it chaff, that's quite the insult to the myriad of shooters that post/posted there.