Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

A few months back I wrote a post “Flickr is Dead.” When I wrote that post I didn’t mean dead literally, I just meant that the soul of social photo sharing was migrating away from Flickr over to Google+.

Over the past few months the tide has begun shifting even more. Photographers are moving in mass from Flickr to Google+ as their primary photo sharing network.

Just like the social crowd moved from Webshots and Fotolog to Flickr a number of years ago, the social photography crowd is now moving from Flickr to Google+.

There are a number of reasons why this is happening and in this post I’ll outline some of the key ones.

1. Google+ has momentum, energy, excitement and has captured the imagination of photographers all over the world. Social photographers want to be a part of something big, something that is growing. People feel that energy and want to be a part of it. It’s hard to actually understand this social magic, but Google+ clearly has it right now for photographers.

2. Google employees are actively engaged with the photographic community. A ton of Google employees are working both online and offline to engage the community. They post their own photos and they interact with other photographers. They use their streams to promote the work of newcomers in the community. They attend photowalks. We just did a Death Valley trip and I think 8 or so Googlers showed up for the trip. They are visible engaged evangelists promoting social photography at Google both online and in person. When was the last time you actually saw someone from Flickr show up for a photowalk?

By the way, you are coming on our Google+ San Jose photowalk on December 8th, right? 74 people have already signed up for it.

3. Google has better tools to manage your social experience. The biggest problem at flickr right now is that the tools to manage your social experience are weak. At Google when you block somebody, they are really and truly blocked. You don’t see them ANYWHERE on the site. Trolls, griefers, stalkers, harassers, etc, can be instantly zapped out of existence on the site with a touch of a button. They can’t see you (unless they log out) and you don’t see them *anywhere* on the site. They become totally invisible. It’s so perfect.

Flickr doesn’t realize it yet but they have a BIG problem with harassment. Blocking people at flickr is weak and ineffective. They still can post on your friends’ photos so that you’ll see them. They still can post in groups that you’re a member of. This is a poison that I’ve personally watched drive many of the best accounts away from Flickr.

4. You get far, far more engagement on your photos on Google+ than on Flickr. It might take a little bit of work and interaction, but once you engage on Google+ you’ll find that every possible metric to measure (number of followers, number of views, number of comments, number of +1s, quality of interaction) is far superior.

I think part of why this is so is because that in addition to photographers being on Google+ there are also a ton of non-photographers. These non-photographers never would have come to flickr in the past because, well, they’re not photographers. On Google+ they are on the site for different reasons but still end up exposed to your photography. Because of this, you reach a much larger audience in the end.

The day before yesterday +Maria Bartiromo reshared one of +Trey Ratcliff’s photos. I doubt Maria Bartoroma would ever have an account on Flickr, but she’s a top account on Google+ and as such is being exposed to great photography every single day.

5. Hangouts are like social superglue. Flickr recently launched this sort of lame feature where you can share your flickr photos with other users and text chat about them — super, super, super, super lame. Nobody wants to do this. Nobody is using this. Text chatting only is so “you’ve got mail” AOLish — it belongs to the last decade, not the next decade.

Google+ photographers are interacting in real time, live with video and audio. I hosted a hangout the other day and over 60 people showed up during it to socialize. +Trey Ratcliff is doing fun and interesting broadcasted hangouts (I’ll be on Trey’s show tomorrow night at 7pm PST btw). A bunch of the female photographers on Google+ just launched a new hangout show called “Life Through the Lens” photography from a woman’s perspective.

On Google+ I can watch +Scott Jarvie edit his photos live in real time. Jarvie generously shares with the rest of us his tips and techniques. I can learn about +Paul Roustan’s body painting photography and how he prints his work and gets it in galleries. Last night I got to hear +Michael Bonocore explain to me how he made this shot with fire and spinning wool.

Hangouts can be planned or spontaneous. When you connect with other photographers it’s connecting with them on a whole different level when it’s face to face and with audio and video. Flickr’s groups helped flickr create small intimate experiences, hangouts are like that x 1,000.

Also because people are nicer to each other when they interact face to face than via text, the whole tone of photographer interaction is enhanced by this tool on Google+.

6. Shared circles lets the community promote great photographers. I’ve shared my photography circles a few times now. People are sharing circles every day. When we share circles it massively promotes other photographers on the site — they get new followers (hence more momentum). An audience for your work can be built so much faster as people end up frequently sharing great circles of talented photographers. Here are two of my posts where I’ve shared my own circles for you to find some great photographers that I’m following too.

7. Circles are smarter contact management. At flickr you just get two buckets. Your friends/family and your contacts. And yet sometimes you need to categorize your friends differently than just those two buckets.

For example: the weekend before last 55 or so of us spent that amazing weekend shooting in Death Valley. With Google+ I was able to create a Death Valley circle and use that to broadcast updates just to that group of people. You can create circles of San Francisco Photographers, Best Friend Photographers, Neon Shooters, Night Photographers, Detroit Photographers (for when I visit Detroit in Jan), etc. The ways to organize your contacts are limitless.

8. Strong Curation and Resharing. Explore is a joke. Even though I’ve been unblacklisted from it now (thanks +Zack Shepard!), I still never go there. The photo quality is poor. You get lots of watermarked photos and sort of less interesting artistic stuff. Rather than have to look at photos supposedly selected by some hokey donkey on flickr, at Google+ if something is particularly good it gets reshared and I get to see it from the people that I follow. These people have much better taste than Flickr’s dumb algorithm.

And then there are other people like +Jarek Klimek who are curating huge sized versions of some of the best Google+ photos offsite at PhotoExtract. PhotoExtract kicks Explore’s ass so hard.

Also when something is featured on Photo Extract or reshared by your friends you don’t get all those dumb sparkly gif awards all over your photo or people begging you to add it to a bunch of dumb groups.

9. Google owns the future of search. No doubt about it. Yahoo is on the way out for search. They tried to partner up with the Bingers but everybody still uses Google. Already Google+ entries are starting to index very highly on Google. If you care about search, if you care about SEO — if you are a professional photographer especially and want to be easily found on Google.com, Google+ is your best way to try and promote your work.

10. Innovation, Innovation, Innovation. You just can’t beat it. People started using hashtags on G+ and Google stepped up and linked them. People were having a problem with trolls in some hangouts and we got a tool to block them right there from the hangout. When +Vincent Mo first built the lightbox view he forgot to give us a button to +1 photos from there. BAMM it gets fixed, as smooth as apples and steak.

(Remember +Vic Gundotra, +Vincent Mo, +Dave Cohen and +Brian Rose should all get hefty bonuses this year, plus +Ricardo Lagos even though he isn’t even on the photos team, oh wait and +Chris Chabot too, and lots of other good Googlers).

Google is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Google+ and the entire company is focused on it. Contrast this with Yahoo who spent last Christmas laying off flickr employees at twice the rate of the general company layoffs. Flickr has stagnated and is not innovating. Google is aggressively expanding and growing Google+.

Photo of me jumping on Mesquite Dunes by +Mark Esguerra.

Wow!

What a GREAT weekend I just got back from!

About 50 of us descended on the small town of Beatty, NV this weekend and spent an entire weekend doing very little sleeping and lots and lots and lots of shooting in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Our weekend Mayor of Beatty +Luc Asbury — who was on his 7th trip to Death Valley — gave us a great itinerary of some of the most iconic Death Valley locations and right now some of the most amazing Death Valley photographs are popping up under the #DV2011 hashtag on G+.

There are so many highlights to this weekend that I don’t even know where to begin — so many talented photographers and good friends were on this trip. Many of us stayed at the Atomic Inn Motel (which was hard to find because the HUGE neon sign outside said Phoenix Inn, but the staff was super nice). Food was somewhat limited in Beatty, although a few of us did brave the smoke filled casino to get to the 24 hour Denny’s and get our fix of steak and eggs.

Some people got in as early as Thursday, but I came in on Friday. Our first stop was the Ghost Town of Rhyolite, NV where we got a great sunset and also did some fantastic night shooting and light painting into the evening. We took a brief break to take over the back room of the Sourdough Saloon for drinks and adult beverages, went out and did some more light painting, and then came back yet again to the Sourdough Saloon where I think we frightened some of the locals.

In Ghost Colors – Rhyolite, NV, by +Matt Roe.

If you’ve never shot Rhyolite at night, you definitely want to put this one on your list.

It was fun for me to finally get to try out the Jarvie Window (this flash ring thing that +Scott Jarvie uses for making really awesome wide angle portraits of people). After some good drinks and fun bar portraits most of us headed off to bed to get ready for our big sunrise shoot out at the dunes the next morning.

+Bo Lorentzen had also made up the *coolest* +1 Death Valley 2011 Google pins and he handed those out as well. Thanks again Bo for having those made up!

The Mesquite Dunes in Death Valley are really something. Saturday morning some of us got up at the brisk hour of 4am to meet up for our 4-5am departure time to make it out to the dunes by sunrise. Still others (+Amy Heiden, +Scott Jarvie and +Sly Vegas) got up at 3am to make it out there even earlier.

Shooting the dunes is tricky, but they are beautiful. I still think I’ve got about 5 hours of work left on one of my photos from that morning’s shoot cloning the thousands of little footprints out of the sand. We also had a good time just playing around on the dunes too. +Lotus Carroll took the challenge to roll down the Dunes and not to be outdone +Matt Roe decided to jump off of them gonzo style. +Mark Esguerra got that great photo of me doing my own jumping up above.

We thought we lost Sly in the dunes later that morning and had a good time at breakfast coming up with scenarios on how Sly had disappeared to have his Carlos Castaneda/Jim Morrison sort of dune experience. In actuality Sly had really just snuck off back to the motel with +Cliff Blaise.

Google I Love You So Much I’d +1 That, Death Valley Edition.

Breakfast was a great but greasy all you can eat thing. At breakfast we thanked everybody for making the trip and introduced the folks who had made the trip from Google — +Dave Cohen, +Brian Rose, +Vincent Mo, +Tony Paine, +Ricardo Lagos, Tim St. Clair, Vega Paithankar, Gerard Sanz, Agata Krzysztofik, and +Priscila Queiroz. (I’m sure I probably left somebody from Google out, if so let me know so I can add them).

Also at breakfast I got to finally get my +Ricardo Liberato Liber Angry Guy portrait.

After the Dunes and breakfast in Stovepipe Wells, we made our way to the grandaddy of them all in Death Valley, The racetrack. We stopped off for a brief nap at Scotty’s Castle on the way where +Luc Asbury told me the story about his first ever trip to Death Valley which was preceded by a dream that he’d had about lighting up the grandstand at the Racetrack. We also made a stop at Ubehebe Crater.

The Racetrack is a mysterious almost spiritual place. You have to drive in on a somewhat treacherous dirt/rock road for about an hour and half. I had rented a 4×4 and still couldn’t go much more than about 70 mph (joking, really the pace is about 20 miles per hour or slower on this road). We saw a Ford Expedition that had a flat tire on the road on the way in — bummer. +Matt Roe told me that it’s about $6,000 to get a tow out of there if you get stuck.

All i can say about Death Valley is “WOW” ! ! ! by +sly Vegas.

Out at the racetrack (a giant hard mud playa) are some amazing moving rocks that are referred to as “Sailing Stones.” These large stones in some cases have travelled 100 feet or more and have long tracks cut into the hardened mud. They really are amazing to see. Apparently there is some sort of a scientific explanation for them, but I liked fantasizing in my own head about supernatural or spiritual explanations — because that’s how the place feels. We were able to do some great night shooting out on the Racetrack and +Michael Bonocore and +John Getchel brought some steel wool to do some awesome night fire photographs.

#DV2011 by +Brian Rose.

Unfortunately +Ricardo Lagos, +Matt Roe, +Lotus Carroll and myself stopped at THE WRONG PARKING LOT!!! and missed some of the fire fun — instead we wandered aimlessly around the middle of the Playa but got some great shots out of it.

Death Valley Google+ Photowalk Weekend 2011 (6 photos), on Google+, by +Dave Cohen.

Many people stayed out and slept on the Playa that night. We did end up making it out alive though, only to have to get up for a 4am departure time for Zabriskie Point the next morning.

After driving about halfway to Zabriskie Point behind +Elizabeth Hahn (who thankfully drives fast!) I unfortunately realized that I’d made the boneheaded mistake of leaving my camera back in my motel room. Fortunately +Karen Hutton was right behind us and I was able to drop +Ricardo Lagos into her car and go back and get my camera.

Although I didn’t make it to Zabriskie point by sunrise, I did get to almost hit four donkeys in the road (hey, we were warned with a Donkey Crossing sign) and still got a wonderful sunrise shot of the salt flats. Stefan Bäurle (and a lot of others) got a pretty kick ass shot though!

After breakfast on Sunday people sort of broke up to do different things. We were able to get some amazing abandoned buildings and cars at the old Cashier Mill and Aguereberry Mining Camp along with some great rock shots on the Canyon into that mine. We also made a sunset/night excursion into Badwater, but we were robbed of our sunset by a heavy layer of overcast fog and a bit of rain. And I finally got the giant “Cowboy Steak” that I wanted back at Furnace Creek and got to watch +Karen Hutton talk for about 5 minutes with our waiter about show tunes.

Aguereberry Mining Camp, Death Valley. 2011, by +Ricardo Lagos.

Some people stuck around for still another Monday Morning sunrise (you’ve got endurance +Cynthia Pyun!) and I heard +Luc Asbury took people the long way home on the drive back to the Bay Area on Monday.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to name each and every person on the trip in this long blog post. I met so many more great photographers on this trip and was really impressed with everyone who made it out for the weekend. It was truly one of my best weekends ever and my only regret is that I didn’t get to spend more one on one time shooting with even more people.

I don’t know about those of you who went on the trip but I’m thinking we ought to make this an annual event and head back there again next year at this time. Death Valley is so rich and there is still so much that we didn’t get to shoot — I feel like we barely scratched the surface and know that as great as the shots that we got this trip are that we should all think about having just as good a time again next year.

Thanks again to Google for the great turnout and for supporting our event and to every photographer who made the great weekend out there. I had a total blast and I hope you did too.

If you’d like to add some of the great photographers on this trip to your Google+ account, you can find a lot of them doing a search on Google+ for the hashtag #DV2011.

Update: Also don’t miss +Amy Heiden’s excellent list of what she loved about Death Valley and +Scott Jarvie’s equally amusing 45 Fond Memories. +Elizabeth Hahn’s take here as well.

A few weeks ago I jumped the gun (as I frequently do) and published a review of +Trey Ratcliff‘s awesome new app “Stuck on Earth.” This is a brand spanking new iPad app that is probably the single best app for traveling photographers that exists on the market today. It absolutely blows away anything by the likes of Conde Nast or Lonely Planet or the Travel Channel or any of these other attempts at serious travel apps. This app was built and designed for photographers and best of all it’s absolutely free.

It’s a wonderful tool for you to use in planning a trip and seeing both highly rated flickr geotagged photos as well as user curated lists of some of the best photo spots on the planet. I was one of the contributors to the app and contributed the 50 best secret shots to shoot San Francisco.

Above is a video interview by two of my favorite people in the tech/photographic community +Robert Scoble and +Trey Ratcliff (I’m putting +’s in front of people’s names sometimes now because Google+ is so awesome and I want to link to people’s Google+ accounts so that you will follow them there too).

Also here is Trey’s announcement on the app on Google+ from yesterday as well as a very good conversation about why he built if for the iPad initially instead of Android (even though some Android users are getting pissed about this — both Trey and I are Android users by the way).

Anyways, if you are an iPad user (I bought one just to get this app) GO GET THIS APP HERE NOW!!!

Wow!

Google is giving away 100 of the new Ice Cream Sandwich Nexus phones, an opportunity for 10 people to be shown at the Satchi Gallery in London and a once of a lifetime opportunity to shoot anywhere in the world at your destination of choice!

They are doing this as part of a photography contest that they are running. You have to be a university student in order to qualify for the contest, but this looks like a GREAT contest. My kids are a little young to apply yet, but I always like showing this great photo of mine (above) of my son William and daughter Holly.

Check out more of the details on the Google Blog or here.

Yesterday over at the Slate, Farhad Manjoo wrote a post called “Google+ is Dead.”

In it he writes “The real test of Google’s social network is what people do after they join. As far as anyone can tell, they aren’t doing a whole lot.” He says he is “surprised” at how dreary it has become.

Huh?

Farhad doesn’t seem to have spent much time on Google+ recently. His last post about baby products was on August 22nd.

My experience has been the *EXACT* opposite. My experience (as an active daily user) is that Google+ is not only NOT dead, it is alive and thriving! It is the most exciting social network I’ve ever been a part of.

In response to Farhad’s article, I wanted to highlight some of my own personal experiences to point out what I’d call a raging social success for me.

Note that much of my experience revolves around the photography space on Google+. I’m a photographer and so that’s where my interest is. I can’t vouch for the baby product crowd (although Farood did get 45 comments on his baby product post which sort of feels like alot).

Let’s start with circles. Farhad says that Google has failed at keeping people returning to the site. Here was my last posting of my kick ass photographers circle on Google+. I had to publish it in two parts because there were soooooo many. Here are 1,000 active photographers, many posting to Google+ every single day. These photographers are posting *KICK ASS* photos constantly and getting tons of engagement. If Google+ is dead, somebody sure forgot to tell these folks.

There are wayyyyy more than these folks in the photography community though — in fact I feel bad about my circles because I’ve overlooked so many other kick ass photographers that are just as active on the site. There’s so many great phototgraphers posting it’s hard to keep up!

Photography is THRIVING on Google+ right now, moreso than any place else on the web — more than Flickr, more than Facebook, more than Twitter — absolutely thriving.

Now how about debate and engagement? The other day my friend +Trey Ratcliff posted a post about why he doesn’t use watermarks on his photos. That post got over 1,800 +1s, 588 reshares, and as of this post 443 comments. 443 COMMENTS! That’s even more comments than Farhad got on a major news site like Slate writing an inflamatory article with the title “Google+ is Dead.”

How is it that a raging debate about watermarking 443 comments long is taking place on a dead site? Hell, even +Maria Bartiromo +1′d that sexy thing.

Just today I’m currently having a debate with the focus police on one of my photos (alot of people don’t like my out of focus stuff) that is moving by the minute.

Forget about the big picture stuff though, what about the little more personal and private stuff. I spent a few years on Flickr interacting with tons of people — but with many of them I never got to really meet or talk to them face to face, until Google Hangouts that is.

Now I’m having video chat conversations with friends all over the world, a bunch of people jumping into a room on any given night and talking about things like shaving sheep or photography or photo safari trips, or censorship, or any number of things, they’re great!

Did I mention a group of us are going to Death Valley? That’s right. So far 45 photographers are planning to take over the town of Beatty IN REAL LIFE! People are coming in from all over the U.S., hell in +Ricardo Liberato’s case all over the world, to get together and make amazing art in one of the most dramatic and beautiful settings in the world. How is this happening, yep, all on the dead ol’ place Google+.

And while my account on Google+ is a popular one, this does not explain why it is so vibrant and alive to so many others. I keep seeing post after post after post from photographers (many less popular than me) who are posting less and less at places like Flickr and Facebook and more and more at Google+. It’s a huge groundswell of a movement.

So do I think Google+ is dead? No. Far from it. To the contrary Google+ is alive and thriving and growing and getting better and better and better every day.

At the same time I’m confident in Google’s ability to continue pushing the successful site forward. The money that Google is spending on Google+, the rapid innovation, the interaction with the community by Googlers themselves, the ability to cross promote Google+ to other successful properties (just imagine when they turn the promotion machine on with YouTube!), the ability to integrate Google+ into search and the importance it will play for anyone who cares about SEO, there are so many reasons why Google+ will be successful in the long run.

In the meantime, for those of us who are there today, it is an engaging dynamic playground and it’s where some of the best emerging artists on the internet are choosing to publish their best work.

I don’t think Farhad has given Google+ a fair chance. I also don’t think he’s playing in the same playground that I’m playing in right now, because for me (and thousands of other active daily photographers) Google+ is very much vibrant, alive and thriving.

If you are not already on Google+ don’t listen to naysayers like Farhad — come on over, the water’s warm, the beer is cold, and they have the best damn oysters on the half shell that you’ve ever had in your life!

You can find me on Google+ here.

Update: Another interesting take by the New York Times titled “Google+ Isn’t Going Away,” talks about how important Google+ is to Google as simply another layer to integrate into their search service.

Sure, Google hopes to build a social network that competes with Facebook, Twitter and other social services, but that is not the main reason the company has put so many resources behind Google+. Instead, Google+ is a social layer that has always been intended to sit on top of the company’s flagship product: search.”