Gauging interest in a videoconference group to share and discuss photographic work

I'd like to gauge interest amongst the Photrio community in a regular get-together over videoconference during which people can share and discuss their photographic work.

I'm thinking something like a monthly one-hour long meeting in which three people spend 20 minutes presenting/describing their work followed by an interactive group discussion about the work. The idea is to give people an opportunity to present their work to others in an informal, relaxed environment.

The work can be in any genre - landscape, street, documentary, etc. and produced using either analog or digital cameras. The work can be a completed or in-progress project, or just a set of photographs that you haven't quite figured out what to do with yet. Maybe you've been thinking about making a self-published book and would like some input on editing/sequencing. Or you have a draft of your photobook/zine you'd like to share. It's all fair game. The main idea is to just get your work out there in one form or another and share it with others.

Meetings would be held using freely-downloadable videoconferencing software like Zoom or Google Meet. I'm leaning towards the latter only because it allows up to 1 hr meetings with 60 participants free of charge. Zoom has a limit of 40 minutes at no charge. I'm based in the US (Pacific Time Zone) so the meetings would be in a US friendly time but open to those outside the US as well.

If this sounds appealing to you then please either reply to this thread or send me a private message here at Photrio. If there's enough traction for this idea then I'll take it forward.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

I am hopeful that you get something like this to work. I'm just 'bumping' this to the shuffle. For many years I attended weekly "table talks." They went on for over 20 years. Many good friends.
Best of luck.

If you make a post for sign up in Member Organized Functions, you will likely get some interest. You should probably get someone who is willing to show some stuff, first. Maybe if you perused the gallery and selected a few to ask? I think three people presenting in an hour is a bit much. I think you should go with one and let the discussion peter out on its own, if it doesn't fill the whole hour.

sasah zib said:

I am hopeful that you get something like this to work. I'm just 'bumping' this to the shuffle. For many years I attended weekly "table talks." They went on for over 20 years. Many good friends.
Best of luck.

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Thanks, hopefully there's enough interest to get something like this going.

Don Heisz said:

If you make a post for sign up in Member Organized Functions, you will likely get some interest. You should probably get someone who is willing to show some stuff, first. Maybe if you perused the gallery and selected a few to ask? I think three people presenting in an hour is a bit much. I think you should go with one and let the discussion peter out on its own, if it doesn't fill the whole hour.

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You may be right, three may be too much. I've been attending 'critique' sessions for the past few years with a group from a local non-profit photography gallery. That group allocated 20 minutes to each presenter so I was following their lead. But if a single presenter followed by a group discussion is a better fit, then I'm all for that.

And good suggestion about using the gallery to find some potential presenters. I will definitely reach out to some members who have posted work there.

Thinking about this, it will probably be handy to have a place to upload photos for some of it.
You could use a Private Conversation here, provided that all participants are over the 20 post count threshold in order to be able to access it. You would need to have a procedure for determining who is participating, in order to "invite" them into the conversation. You could also use Photrio galleries - Sean might even be happy to create a new classification for it - but then only subscribers would be able to upload. You could also use a publicly accessible thread, but that would potentially cause problems with uninvited people wanting to post in the thread.

One of the issues with a Zoom or Meet call is the quality of the video. You have Andre Kertesz trying to show you his prints in detail by pushing them up against a laptop or tablet camera. There are ways to show a photo on your screen, but (1) people need to know how to do it and (2) the photo would need to be scanned. Technically, you would need someone to run the call and do all of that for the person presenting, which would take extra coordination.

Don Heisz said:

One of the issues with a Zoom or Meet call is the quality of the video. You have Andre Kertesz trying to show you his prints in detail by pushing them up against a laptop or tablet camera. There are ways to show a photo on your screen, but (1) people need to know how to do it and (2) the photo would need to be scanned. Technically, you would need someone to run the call and do all of that for the person presenting, which would take extra coordination.

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For the online critiques I've participated in, people have generally presented their photos in digital form using Lightroom, PDFs etc. I shoot analog so I scanned my negatives and presented them as a slideshow in Lightroom. I presented book mockups using the Book module of Lightroom as well. Many of the other participants shot digital which obviated the scanning step, and the people who shoot digital are generally well enough versed in tools like Lightroom or similar.

I plan to run the calls and can provide technical guidance to those who need help to present their work. In the other online meets I've shown in, the presenters joined the call 15 mins early to do a quick dry run to ensure that any technical glitches with screen sharing were worked out in advance. That seemed to work pretty well. Video quality was never an issue in my experience.

logan2z said:

For the online critiques I've participated in, people have generally presented their photos in digital form using Lightroom, PDFs etc. I shoot analog so I scanned my negatives and presented them as a slideshow in Lightroom. I presented book mockups using the Book module of Lightroom as well. Many of the other participants shot digital which obviated the scanning step, and the people who shoot digital are generally well enough versed in tools like Lightroom or similar.

I plan to run the calls and can provide technical guidance to those who need help to present their work. In the other online meets I've shown in, the presenters joined the call 15 mins early to do a quick dry run to ensure that any technical glitches with screen sharing were worked out in advance. That seemed to work pretty well. Video quality was never an issue in my experience.

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I really only mean video quality as far as trying to show an actual print. There are a number of people on here who don't scan their negatives or prints. Obviously not the gallery posters, though.

Would love this!

Could be interesting. I'd be willing to participate.

Chris

Our Darkroom Group used Zoom to meet through the first two years of the Covid experience.
The Screen Share function in Zoom is finicky, but once you figure out how to work with it along with your image presentation utility and your computer system, it works well.
Holding up our prints to the camera was merely frustrating!

MattKing said:

Holding up our prints to the camera was merely frustrating!

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Yeah, I don't think that would work terribly well. Digital presentation - film or print scans - is really the only practical way to go for analog shooters.

haliderollei said:

Would love this!

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mtnbkr said:

Could be interesting. I'd be willing to participate.

Chris

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Great, thanks for expressing interest!

It wouldn't be something that I would be interested in. A bunch of talking heads discussing photos online? I'd rather go see someone's work in person, just to see what's up. At some point (OK, maybe all the time), discussing a work is just going to gather other people's opinions. I need the work to look like I want it to look. This is on top of the bigger issue, that seeing analog prints or what have you on a monitor is not going to be very accurate.