Photography tips: When Internet is wrong.

Who never perform a search to find some photography tips?

Even professional photographers do it, in a search of creativity or for something they are not to use to.

Nowadays, with internet it's nice and fast to find tips about photography, but you should care about what you should believe ... or not!

There is two kinds of photography tips and tricks website, those which are serious and do not care really about popularity, and those which appear always first, very popular with search engine, but with plenty advertising, over loaded about books to buy, materials to buy, links to click that open in a new tab each time, etc ...


Picture of a screen shot from a website photography
Picture of a screen shot from the website Digital camera world, a website which is loaded with advertising and poor photography tips

It's about this kind of website, i want to speak today. They do not care at all about the "tips" they seems to "give", which are usually extremely poor if not totally wrong.

 

Those "photography" website have only one objective: Make money! And to make money, they need to have a lot of visitors, a LOT !

 

So what do they do? They "give" photography tips, for example, just few lines, people goes, read just few lines, and because they are already there, they click on those, everywhere, displayed advertising, pseudo new tips to not perform, again, a new search.

At the end some of the visitors buy some photography books, usually very cheap and badly made photography books, where most of their tips are absolutely not worth to be written, because it's just to harvest the "web surfer" (like us).

 

A good example of a very bad photography tips website is this Digital Camera World and their wrong and bad tips about ISO (all their tips are mostly craps)

In the beginning i thought it was a typo, but when they insist in the absurdity way, how it can be a typo ? clearly this person (the writer) have no idea what he is speaking about.

 

In this example they are speaking about high ISO and when to increase ISO. I quoted their text : "... or a bright landscape" and "when you want to slow down the shutter speed". Seriously ? may be the most stupid tips i ever heard! When you want to slow down your shutter speed, you do exactly the opposite, you bring down your ISO, and that is a fact!

But let's continue with this pseudo photography tips, quoting the sentence again: "To capture movement ...blabla.. you will need an extreme ISO to get better ... blabla" at this level of stupidity they are making fun of us, other wise it's not possible to write stupid thing like this.

Picture : showing the exif of the photograph of the river
Picture : showing the exif of the photograph of the river

Even the Exif of the photograph of this page is telling exactly the opposite of their writing. Look on the side i did a screenshot of the Exif of this picture on their website, the picture was taken at ISO 200! so very low ISO for a shutter speed of 2 and a half second! to get the water movement !

 

The true is (like the picture on their website show it: To capture motion (to have some blur to feel the motion on your photograph like a river or a falls) you need to slow down the shutter speed, by doing so you need to put down your ISO, if you do the opposite you are freezing the motion, because you will need to increase the speed of the shutter to keep the same amount of light, specially if you are in auto or semi auto mode, the camera will do it for you, and if you are in manual mode, you will got an overexposed picture, or even just a full blank white picture if you keep a slow shutter speed and increase to high ISO, and that is a fact too!

I can write 100 pages about each pseudo photography websites i have found, i can even give you a list, but the most important is how to recognize them and avoid them.

 

In their most majorities they operate in the same way, use mostly the same words and have roughly the same design and ergonomics.

When you arrive on those pseudo photography tips website, the first thing you notice, they look over loaded with "Free" downloads, "Free" things everywhere across the page.

So your first impression is "wow they have plenty of things to learn", and you feel a bit lost, but to made you being lost ... it's made for!

But let resume and built a very simple five tips list, which will ring the alarm when you arrive on those type of websites:

  1. You feel a bit lost at the arrival, plenty of thing to look at. It's made to divert you. By doing it, they know that after few minutes, you will forgot why you arrive on this website.

  2. Each time you click on a link, it open in a new tab or window (on Digital Camera world, i didn't paid attention in the beginning, as a result i got more than 20 tabs open just by clicking on the links on the right column!).

  3. When they propose to download always something for "free". Nowadays the word "Free" is very appealing, so they use it, over and over. If you see it on each page or more than two times on a single page, it's time to run away.

  4. If they ask for an email address to download something run away especially if they propose you to subscribe to a newsletter to get free download. It's because they want only your email to spam you, and you cannot download something if you do not give your email and confirm it from a link sent to your email, and you can be sure that what you will download, it's not even worth the few seconds spent to download it.

  5. When you read something, you always need to change a page (with the "next" link on their page) after few lines of words. In fact you will need to change 3-5 times and more for something that can be written in only 1 little page! This one is made on purpose and have 2 advantages for them.
    - 1) They can change the advertising on the next page and target more precisely your interest.
    - 2) They can count more page view per visitors. The "more pages view" have no effect on you, but have a big one on the search engines, so indirectly and directly increasing their income, though Google knows about it and changed its algorithm, many website continue to do it.

Do not get me wrong, a photography website need income to be alive, but there is a way to do it, a proper way, and it's not by giving fake tips or just writing few lines about photography that they should fool us.

 

There is plenty of excellent photography website out there, like this excellent website, The Digital Picture just to name one, he have some advertising but far to be overloaded with it, when you arrive on it you are not lost at all, etc... So you can see that this is a true good photography website, with real tips, with true comparisons about photographic materials, and a huge respectable work behind. You, also, do not need to change page every 2 or 3 sentences, like what... internet is not always wrong.


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