A Photo Essay of Sorts: My Search For Forgotten People
A post from minniev in Wednesday C&C "No Theme" Thread #882 / Revived #102 on 2025 03 12*
and check the discussion that followed.
Could we start a photojournalism category? The idea would be to post a series of photos and text on a subject of interest to you. The skies the limit for subjects. For those old enough to remember, think about our own modest little Life magazine. Do a report on a person, an industry, an event, a social issue or whatever. The emphasis isn't on a single photo. It's a series of images selected to tell a story of the poster's choice. The selection and ordering are important. So is the text included.
What do you think? If we get reponses here expressing interest, we can look at setting something up.
I think the categories are fine now, maybe still too many. Personally I kook a the threads tab to see what is new. If you make a photo story it can go under the image discussion thread.
Just post your photo story in the image forum and it will be fine.
Quite a few of us are placing several images in the same post, and linking them with text that tells a story. I include myself, as I dont think I have ever posted a photo without accompanying text. And I am certainly not alone. I dont think we need a new category to encourage this behaviour:
You want a new category for your own interest but have completely stomped on the other categories. All the previous genre specific posts are now lumped in together and it is basically impossible (without spending ages scrolling down through them) to find old or all posts of a specific genre.
Everyone wants threaded view so that conversations relating to one post are kept together. The same applies to posts to specific genre categories. It keeps them together for logical reference. Anything else is totally illogical.
David, Bryan.
I know we often have posts that consist of a series of photos and I know that these will be accompanied by text. What was being suggested is that there might be more to it than this. Photojournalism itself is a different skill. There might be discussion of such a post as a series in itself, including the text.
No, I'm not looking to cater to my own interests, I'm looking for ideas that might be different and work for this site. Photojournalism?
I accept that with just one person looking enthused about the idea, it isn't going to happen.
Bryan, re genre collections.
Does anyone really, really use our site to look at all the archived genre shots of, say, Landscape? I doubt it very much. The feedback occurs in the threads not the genres. Once a post has been up for more than a couple of weeks I could see no evidence that it was looked at or responded to again. What we got was a big list of genres and gear and other categories that were mainly dormant and this is what those new to the site saw.
Arvo is adding tags to the posts so genres can be grouped for searches, just in case someone wants to do this. (I didn't think this was necessary but it looks like he was right)
Like Bryan, I had misgivings about moving away from genre-based sectioning. I am convinced that this ingenious tagging maneuver will give us a way to hold on to what's good about identifying genres without the risk of having unused sections openly displayed on the forum. It will make it easy to spot genres from the threads view that most of us use, and easier for in-site searches too, but it won't create any empty real estate.Too much empty real estate on a forum makes it look like a ghost town.
But your following comment reinforces my view that no one is listening to what I am saying.
I am NOT asking for genre based threads be listed on the main page. I always agreed on reducing the clutter.
What I am saying is that genre based categories / forums exist under another heading such as Showcase Your Photos.
But anyway, it appears Mike is dead set on taking the site along his road of assisted threads only.
When has exclusion as opposed to inclusion ever worked in the long term?
With this sort of approach you may pick up a few new members along the way. But there wont be many. I assert that there is a majority out there who prefer to make their own posts in their favourite genres and receive a few comments rather than post in a recurrent group genre. Or, like me, a mix of both. Mike, some weeks I have too many images to post in the weeklies. One image or a series and that's enough. What about the other images I want to post?
You can't have just one big group for everything that doesn't fit in the managed threads and think people will be happy with that.
As much as I detested DannoB's delivery, at times he was quite perceptive and there were a fair few things he said which were correct.
I'm listening Bryan but I'm having problems following what you are getting at.
You can post images wherever you choose to post them. No one is restricted to posting them in the Weekly threads. In fact, if you look at the Have Your Photos Critiqued category, it is deliberately set up so that someone seeking Critique can post an image there without having to post it to The Weekly C&C thread.
You can post an image on whatever subject you choose directly to Image Discussions or Showcase your Images. It will show up in Threads in exactly the same way under whatever heading you choose to give your post, as it has always done. A survey was done on this weeks ago. Everyone told us, they positively insisted, that what they wanted was the Threads view to be maintained because all regular users looked in there to see all the posts that had been made and choose whatever they wanted to open. That's what we have.
Or anyone can start a Weekly, or Monthly or whatever takes their fancy on whatever subject they like. No-one has to ask permission from anyone to do it.
Further, if you want to start an ongoing thread on a genre and not have it as a weekly, you can do it. If that is what you want to do mate, nothing has changed.
In my naivete, I always assumed that anyone who made a post did so because they wanted it to be seen and responded to. The Weekly threads give a post the best chance of this happening. That's the sole reason they have been introduced. If we are going to build numbers, people need to see activity, not, in minniev's term, ghost houses. But, s'help me, you don't have to use them.
You and I have discussed this before. You had noted that you didn't get many responses to some of your shots. I suggested you might try a "Nature" Weekly. You decided not to do so. Fair enough. You continued to make individual posts and you still can.
I agree that Danno could be quite perceptive but I don't see the relevance to this discussion.
I posted the concept of a managed Nature or Fauna forum twice. There was only ever one response and that was in the negative. You suggested I ask again. My reply was that I wasn't going to beg...
Simply that genre forums exist under one of the other top levels - as I said, most likely Showcase. I don't know what is so difficult to understand about that.
Even Paula has posted twice that she thinks they should exist in some form.
However, Alan has indicated it's not going to happen. So there ya go.
Bryan, do you mean hidden like we have done with the weekly/challenges. I would consider that. What I don;t want to do is go back to the way we had it before.
Me, I don't understand tags and whether that is as easy as forums.
If that is what you mean, give me a list of genres (not too many) and we can discuss this -maybe in a separate thread.
No I wouldn't expect too many. Just on a request basis perhaps, after a few users were consistently posting a certain genre.
I would start with Fauna as my only request. I added Street to the mock up as a few seem to post there. But that might not be the case anymore. The others seemed pretty quiet. Flowers (Flora) seemed to have a few bursts every now and then...
So now I have a question. How does one create a forum like that? Is it an ability granted to the maintainers of the weeklies and equivalent?
Assuming that sub-forums can be added to an upper level, then this mock up would be what the user would see after clicking on the relevant sub-forum.
Note that we now see another category to the right of Showcase Your Photos (circled in red) before the All Threads button
I don't know if it is achievable. I recall comments that there can be up to 4 levels?
Actually, Dev2 isn't a copy of production any more. It has third level categories (forums) underneath "Showcase your photos" in this structure: Is that what you would like?
I'm not concerned with what any hidden structure might look like.
I'm concerned with what people are going to see when they go to dprevived.com/
At the moment, looking at Alan's mock up, are we suggesting that this is what will be seen when someone looks at dprevived.com/ ?
Next question. How are all the headings on Alan's list to be determined? Is this only a mock up or is it the intention to make a list of all the possibilities like architecture, astrophotography and so on. How is this list to be determined?
If the list Alan shows (or something like it) isn't what people will see when they go to dprevived.com/. what will they see?
