The Desert

T

his photograph got a lot of love on Instagram and even more on Facebook. That still doesn’t change my mind about social media these days. In fact, there is a big discussion on a photojournalist group of which I’m a part.

It all comes down to money. Videos generate more income for Meta. Once upon a time, it was a place for still images, but even then it wasn’t great. Photographers were forced to post square pictures made on our phones. I thought I’d gotten around that by posting mostly horizontal images.

Right.

Look into my archives and Instagram saves my horizontally cropped photographs as squares. All I can say is that Meta ain’t betta.

Yesterday I was talking about social media numbers. Let me clarify, the numbers as numbers don’t matter that much to me. They matter as data points used to guide me. That matters when I do projects like Picfair. The pictures I place there, or Getty Images or anyone else matters because they must be salable for some use. If not, there’s no point in it.

So, only a few views, likes or whatever are just too small of a sample size to make any sense of the limited data.

That’s the story.

T

he picture. Last days in New Mexico. I took a last look around and the photography gods were smiling. Everywhere I went a picture showed it face. I must have made ten keepers. Not all of them were like this, but they were all pretty cool.

Sometimes it works out that way. I was feeling nostalgic so I was seeing with different eyes. And, feeling with a different heart.

That’s when the pictures get good.

And, speaking of PicFair. New images. Check them out.

http://raylaskowitz.picfair.com