If you’ve ever submitted a photo and spent $45 or more on a photography contest and never heard back from them and thought to yourself “what the hell is wrong with those people” and “just who are these cranks they hired to judge it anyway?” Well, now you can submit a photo, your portfolio or a body of work to be voted on for free and see exactly, who all the cranks are and maybe you’ll get a comment or two back and maybe photo buyers will stop by and cherry pick photographers the same way I do when I visit contest sites.

Feel free to do whatever you want there, ask a question, submit something for constructive criticism, point out something in the news, whatever works lets just keep it in the realm of professional photography. If you put something up you’re not happy about just send me an email with remove in the subject line and I’ll delete it. I’m also going to delete any content that’s not related to photography along with the spam. Let’s see if this leads anywhere.

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13 Comments

  1. Very cool. Now somebody vote for me!!!!!

    Jeff

  3. Hell yeah…feel free to rip apart my offering. Anything in the way of advice would greatly be appreciated.

  4. “le book” is watching all of this, very nervously.

  5. gotta be dumb, but i don’t get how to upload one of your pictures/portfolio…

  6. excuse me, but how is this sidebar photo rank any different than flickr? This will surely turn into a lot of wannabe photographers trying to get attention and most of it will suck.

    APE, I would so much rather you curate the content on your blog, i don’t want to see that!

  7. @ Ben: I think it depends on the users so my theory that is that professionals voting on each other’s work allows only the cream to rise to the top.

    There could be other uses for this as well. I could create a category for producers or retouchers or groomers and people could submit their favorite and others who have worked with them vote and soon we have a handy list of everyones favorite producer.

    There’s no end goal here so it can be whatever it wants.

  8. APE, I agree… I think that the average reader of your blog is going to be more selective with who they vote for than the average flickr user. On flicker you can see an amazing picture and it will have comments like “The picture isn’t sharp.” Yeah, tell that to Paolo Roversi honey!

    I think vibrant color and sharpness are what makes a great flickr photo. I just love it when the praise of a photo is “I love it! Its so sharp. What lens did you use?”

    Jeff

  9. Id like to submit my website (photography) for comments. The photos are photomontages, created with images I shot on film, which were scanned and put together in Photoshop. I appreciate any feedback.

    Thanks!

  10. Rule Number One: You cannot say anything negative about Flickr, or else they come out of the woodwork to pelt you with tomatoes. I’ve never seen loyalty like I’ve seen with Flickr. Tread gingerly.

    With all due respect, when I saw this PhotoRank, I thought, “Well hell, there goes the neighborhood. Open the floodgates — let the masses be discovered”. Yet, there ARE some nice portfolios that have been presented.

    What I find the most interesting about the P.E. occupation is that you’re working with high-caliber, A-List photographers, and you have first-hand knowledge of the editorial business. In this giant world of the internet, that is a rare commodity, to have insight into this world. Selfishly, I’d love this site to stay geared toward this level of work. Your posts are incredibly well-written.

    Flickr will live on; it has a life of its own, and is quite healthy. But the vast majority of these photographers are not doing this for a living; they have day-jobs, and like it or not, that affects what you shoot, and how you orient to this business. Like it or not, when it’s your main income, everything changes. I simply think there’s valuable insight that you have, Mr. P.E., and it’s to a segment of the market that doesn’t interact very much — and that’s professional editorial photographers. Honestly, to go from MartinSchoeller/ChrisBuck/AntonCorbijn, to Flickr, overnight — well, it’s just a jolt. Personally, I vote to keep the level of work, and discussion, geared toward A-List imagery, and to keep the discussions geared toward real-world, professional photography.

    You might not even realize how rare this website really is — to have the quality of discussion, and quality of photographers, so very high. And I write this with all due respect to all segments of the marketplace; it’s just that Flickr is so very well represented, all over the web.

  11. OK I put a story on and now I’m going to start rounding up a posse and we’ll all vote on each other’s stories and rise to the top! Hey Jeff I’ll vote for you if you vote for me!

    Seriously, I was on photosig.com, Usefilm.com and photo.net… well still am I suppose, and if there’s a way to fiddle the rankings, it will be found. Always huge discussions on how to make the rankings more fair.

    Having said that, I’m already planning to prowl the portfolios for 180 magazine before the hoards get wind.

    Now, to keep things upscale, perhaps APE can savage all the portfolios and websites, on the theory that there’s always something to improve, and a pro will learn and fix while everyone else will run away to a friendlier site?

    You’ve got time to do that I’m sure…

    Or edit the portfolios, just remove any that don’t measure up? It’s your blog and I love someone who does a bit of editing so I don’t have to do it.

    Remove anything that’s more than a certain timeframe old? That will depend on how fast entries come in… or limit entries to 100, oldest one gets the boot… nah that doesn’t work either. Timeframe and numbers plus moving up in the ranks? Nope bias toward oldest around.

    Fascinating to think about this stuff, but could drive one to distraction.

    Kim.

  12. Maybe you should precise if non-professional are welcome here or not (in which case, I’ll stick to Flickr).

    Also, when you (all) mention professional photographers, are you talking about the 0,1% of talented artists making a living from photography?

    As an amateur with a bit of (photographic) culture, I’ve seen a lot of “average” professional works, and brilliant amateur works.

    (sorry if my english is a bit clumsy, it is not my first langage).

  13. Okay. I’m in. Took me a while to figure out how to do it – and I’m not technically challenged! I ended up linking to my rank page instead of my site. Oh well – hope you enjoy. Comments are welcome. BTW – Great blog – keep it up!

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