Re: RGS 20 Trains event - a few more

Hi Scott,

There's a reason why you're having so much success getting photos on RailPix. Your stuff is interesting and of excellent quality and the screeners there know that it will draw views to the site.....and that is the thing that people need to understand about RailPix. It's not a public database that is governed by politically-correct rules which dictate that everybody’s stuff is automatically welcome. It's a business in which the product is good photography and the revenues are generated by ads on the site. There are lots of online data bases hosting railroad photos, but without a strict quality control process, the quality will vary all over the place. Consumers of this type of image can easily get discouraged when searching a data base that is full of mediocre stuff, and the real gems are few and far between. At least on RailPix, you're not going to find many bad photos. You might find a lot of technically good diesel-wedge photos with no scenery, but no badly exposed, poorly composed, blurry images. The average quality of the images there is very good. And that is why magazine editors, calendar editors, and all manner of other commercial consumers of rail photos regularly browse that data base when they are looking for material. I will tell you straight-up that RailPictures.net has generated thousands of dollars in totally unsolicited income for me and is responsible for a few photo gigs that I have with commercial concerns. I'm not a professional photographer and I don't actively hawk my photos anyplace. I put them on RailPix for people to look at, and people approach me looking for commercial use.

I will also tell you straight-up that RailPictures.net helped me be a much better photographer. When I joined in 2008, I had a lot to learn. What I considered good back then would really make me gag today. And YES, I got rejections. I got quite a lot of them in the first couple years, but it did not take long for me to see that the tough love you get over there was indeed making my pictures better. It made me the harshest critic of my own stuff. In learning the RailPictures.net "recipe", I learned composition, exposure and most of all, HOW TO EDIT. The latter was a long-term evolution that continues today. I now find myself going back and re-doing stuff that was accepted to RailPix years ago, but that no longer meets my own standards.

And yes, I have heard all of the talk about favoritism, etc. etc. etc. I look at it another way. I think that after a while, the screening team over there knows who is generating site hits, and that is what governs the fees they can charge their advertisers. I think they develop a level of trust in some of the more prolific photographers there, and those people do get more freedom. Perhaps the best example is Mike Danneman. Mike has a huge body of high-quality work and I think the folks on RP trust him. I suspect that they don't feel the need to scrutinize his stuff.......because they know he already has.

I think anyone can display their stuff on RailPictures.net, if they put their mind to it. It is a matter of going slow, learning "the recipe", showing steady progress and being respectful. You have to bear in mind that you're asking to put photos on someone else's site and they do have a right to totally control the content. I've seen too many folks approach it indignantly, assuming their stuff was perfect from the get-go and then venting anger at the site owners when told it didn't make the grade. I'm glad I didn't assume my stuff was good in the beginning......because it sure as hell wasn't.

/Kevin Madore



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/04/2020 06:45AM by KevinM.