Some of you may know that I've been heavily involved in the Photography tag since I arrived back in May this year. I just wanted to give a bit of an update on my involvement on Steemit particularly as it relates to photography.

This is kind of like a 'witness' update, except... not! :)

Steemit Photo Challenge

Supported by Hive account@berniesanders and more recently by Hive account@blueorgy who built a useful backend judging app.

This has been running for 12 weeks so far. Hive account@berniesanders has been instrumental in his support not only for the Steemit Photo Challenge, but for photographers on the platform altogether. He also created the Curie project, which I have submitted photography links to for some time. Join the # curie channel on Steemit.chat and read their rules before suggesting links.

The SPC has given over 4300 Steem as prizes, about half of which has come directly from donations from Hive account@berniesanders and a couple others, and the other half has come from his upvotes! :P. He has also provided a $250 USD Gift Certificate as a prize. On top of that, the encouragement to post more has led to more upvotes across the board, with SPC entries showing up in trending each week.

Here are the previous winner posts:

Week 1 - Animal Portrait
Week 2 - Shadows
Week 3 - Desolation
Week 4 - Nature Macro/Closeup
Week 5 - Emotive Human Portrait
Week 6 - Landscapes
Week 7 - Architecture
Week 8 - Long Exposure
Week 9 - Action - High Shutter Speed
Week 10 - Minimalism
Week 11 - Glamour / Fashion
Week 12 - Soul of the City

Curation Trail

Streemian.com is a site which allows you to follow other user's votes as a curation trail. I've set one up which anybody with a Streemian account can follow. I can't promise you high curation rewards, but I can promise that I focus most of my votes on photography. So if you want to encourage and add value to photographers using the platform — follow me.

You can also set up your own bots to follow the votes, if you prefer that. I vote at 100% at least 10 times a day.

Photography Channel

I am a moderator on the photography channel on steemit.chat. It's a place to discuss all things photography, as well as to share links - our own, and others. Join us some time!

Steem Guild - Photography

Most recently I've been given the opportunity to further curate photography on the platform. Working alongside Hive account@pfunk, another regular and early user, I scour the Steemits looking for what I consider to be undervalued photographers producing consistent quality work. The team then gives those posts an upvote usually resulting in about $30 as a booster, likely bringing more eyes to the work and encouraging the poster to stick around!

We work independently to the rest of Steem Guild, having a bit more leeway to work within the photography tag. We are able to reward an author on one post, once per day. So far this weekend we've sent more than 30 Guild upvotes.

What I get out of all of this

I get to look at a lot of sweet work, and I get to help spread value to my area of interest. Reward-wise, I get a maximum of one upvote per day on my posts (if I post every day) and small curation rewards (tend to be about 0.5 SP per post upvoted).

My goal is, and always has been, to spread and increase value to my area of interest (photography) and encourage more interaction on the posts. More photographers (and creatives in general) using the platform, the better.

Supporting me and my projects means supporting photographers from all over the world who are using Steemit to share their work, and I appreciate that support :)

Suggestions

When posting a photo, give us a bit of information or back story. There's just something so bland about opening a post and it's just a single photo sitting there! Include equipment, if you want, techniques. Tell us about the day, where the subject is, etc etc. It just makes it more interesting, and we can learn something!

User Hive account@dreamstream also suggested 'photocritique' which I think is a good idea.

If you'd like to have your photos critiqued, add them to the tag #photocritique and a user who is up to the task will know that you don't mind being critiqued :)