The Collective - Project 2

The Collective is the name of the next project we are going to be completing as a part of our course. We were given the briefing to this project this morning as quite a rough guide as to what we are doing for the next few weeks. The project as a whole is about exploring working together with others, social media platforms and achieving a commission. We’ll be working a lot with other people and seeing how we work better with others as well as creating our own social media pages to get ourselves known as an artist.

The first task we were given as a part of this project was a research task where we had to research multiple social media sites. We had to make a list of our top 5 favourite platforms for our work as a result of looking around at why they’re good for photographers. I looked at around 8 different sites but my top 5 were:

1. Flickr – They layout is good for storing photos, sharing is easy as photographs automatically get put into an ‘explore’ page which anyone can view and look through (therefore, showcasing your work) and receiving comments and tips is easy as you can comment directly on someone’s image.

2. Instagram – It’s got a great layout as your images are on the main pages which you click to get more information, you can tag your images with specific words or phrases which helps you get more viewers who might then follow your page.

3. Twitter – It’s one of the 3 most popular social media sites so it’s highly populated with a lot of people who are interested in various things, you can tag pictures and so on with words relating to get more viewers. You can also use it as a documenting site as you can tweet things without pictures (keeping followers up to date with shoots etc)

4. Facebook – You can easily set up pages for people to like, this means anything you post will automatically appear on their feed. It’s quite a broad site so if you like something, it will show up on your friend’s feeds therefore spreading your page even further. You can receive comments in a very easy simple way as its just below the photos

5. 500px – It’s a site entirely based on photos which is good for photographers to share their work with other photographers or photo lovers. It’s helpful as you can receive extremely helpful tips from more experienced workers.

As a class, we narrowed our ‘class’ pages down to Flickr, Facebook, Instagram and 500px so in the next few weeks we will be collectively creating group pages to present all of our work. I am personally going to create a Flickr page and possibly a Facebook page to go with my website and blog on Wix.