"I'm a bit of a photography buff, a Flickr Pro user for years, and I'm not sure I want my photographs to be in the same place where I update friends and acquaintances about my status. It's an entirely different thing to me."
Absolutely agree. I'm a hobbyist travel photographer, so I end up with essentially two kinds of photos: photos of a place, where I try and form a nice composition, post process (crop, colors, balance, etc.) and then carefully catalog on flickr (for the former, I might take 20,000 photos during a week, and end up with a couple dozen really choice ones I want to keep in this way), and cheesy photos of me and my family at these places, mostly goofing off with statues or whatever.
The semantics of the two kinds of photos couldn't be different. So I use FB and G+ for the latter, and flickr most definitely for my carefully curated former.
How can you possibly take 20,000 photos in a week? The math just doesn't work out, if you spent only 10 seconds composing a shot (and I'd argue it takes longer than that if you are a "photographer" and not a drive-by "snapshotter") that amounts to 8 hours per day of JUST picture taking, leaving no time to even move from location to location.
Also, the average DSLR has a shutter life expectancy of around 100000-150000 cycles. I doubt you're replacing your camera body every 5 trips.
It's not that hard. You're assuming I'm only take one shot of a scene. It's really not that hard to take 3 or 4 a second in some cases. If I'm shooting a panorama, I might take 12 or 13 shots in ~10 seconds.
I usually shoot more like 10,000-15,000 in a week, but I've gone closer to 20,000 in a couple cases. It's only 1500 photos a day for a 10,000 shot week. Which averages just a bit over 1 a minute for an 8 hour day (but who says I only spend 8 hours out and about?) but in truth, the shot times are more clumpy. For example, I shot about 30 photos in 2 minutes of Vasari's fresco inside the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo). I'll probably combine all those into one or two larger photos stitched up.
Differently, walking up to the same Basilica along a street in Florence offered several very different compositions of the same street. In 5 minutes I was able to shoot 20 pretty decent shots, and probably 1 or 2 really good ones.
That's 50 shots of the same building in a total of 7 minutes.
Riding on local public transport often gives you views of lots of neat things, and only one or two seconds to shoot them.
I'm not even counting the family photos I also took in the meantime.
And yes, I'll actually probably start looking for a replacement camera body sometime next year. I shoot with a D60, so it's only about $400-450...trivial compared to the cost of 5 or 6 2- week trips overseas.
My wife used to think I was crazy, but now years later, going over these old photo archives, we can remember in fantastic detail many of the great places we've traveled together.
You're assuming he's only taking one exposure per scene. It's easy to take that many photos in only a few days, let alone a week. Hell, I can take 300 shots of my infant son playing around in about 15 minutes.
It's really not that crazy. I know lots of photographers who went to Africa for a week and took 10k+ photos. I can take 500+ in about 30 minutes with an animated model if I'm doing more of "do your thing and I'll try to catch some good shots" versus "a carefully planned out set of poses".
Yeah, but there's something different about doing it that way. I don't get to just put my stuff out there the same way for people to stumble on. I get between 20 to 100 views a day on my flickr page and I have absolutely no idea who it is. On occasion I'll get messaged by a travel guide or a competition or something that wants to use one of my photos or have me compete.
Absolutely agree. I'm a hobbyist travel photographer, so I end up with essentially two kinds of photos: photos of a place, where I try and form a nice composition, post process (crop, colors, balance, etc.) and then carefully catalog on flickr (for the former, I might take 20,000 photos during a week, and end up with a couple dozen really choice ones I want to keep in this way), and cheesy photos of me and my family at these places, mostly goofing off with statues or whatever.
The semantics of the two kinds of photos couldn't be different. So I use FB and G+ for the latter, and flickr most definitely for my carefully curated former.