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Hi everyone,
We previously asked what was the acceptable time to do a challenge between 24/48/72h because of film photographers. Quite a few people shooting film told us that even 72h is not enough.
We can split each month challenge into two (Digital & Film) but the theme will stay the same. The Film side will be judged differently because it’s not as easy as shooting with digital.
The basic idea is to show each new theme on 27th of each month, a counter will then be shown on the Lensblr page until the challenge is over. (there will be two counters actually, one 48h and the other 96h). We will also post on our Facebook page about it each month.
Edit: some people commented, and we agree, we shouldn’t split things in 2. Still, film photographers do need more time, so we’re thinking to allow 96 or 120 hours (4 or 5 days total).
You will be able to submit using a special tag on your posts (or via a separate submission page on our website).
People will be able to see live the submissions by going to their dashboard and tracking that specific tag, or by visiting a special page on our tumblr site. Of course, that also means that once you submit everyone is able to see your great idea ;) You will have the choice to post early or just before the challenge ends.
Submission time will not be taken into account to judge the picture.
Edit: To answer some questions -
“please explain in really easy terms how to post images for the contest. Please!”
Don’t worry - we will explain in detail.
“Is this for all photographers on Tumblr or just Lensblr Members?”
Yes, of course it will be open to all photographers on Tumblr!
“… I don’t get how long I have since I use film?”
We’ll give the same time for everyone, trying to appreciate that it takes more time for film photographers.
“Also, what’s the final outcome of submission? Promotion or..??”
The final outcome will be posting the top picks on Lensblr & keeping them on a separate page on our website until the next month’s challange. Which is sort of a promotion I guess, but not really above and beyond what we always do to promote original tumblr photographers :) Maybe if we are lucky we can work something out with some other Tumblr blogs to help by reblogging the best submissions :)
Hi everyone,
We’re thinking about introducing monthly themes with a twist, you will only have a short amount of time to shoot. You will get the theme by email/tumblr/facebook/twitter and you will have only 24/48/72 hours to do it. It will be fun and everyone will have a chance to be on the final picks (we will also show all the entries on a special page).
We’ll tell you more about it later…
The only downside of that idea is for film photographers (they need more time) so that’s why I’m asking this question to the people who still use film:
How much time do you need between the theme announcement and the contest end ? 24/48 or 72 hours ?
Here’s a great wildlife photographer that we interviewed here on Lensblr seeking some help and deserving it !
Thanks to all of you for encouraging my photography. I truly appreciate you following. I have a favor to ask …? I am trying to build my Facebook artist page. Apparently this is becoming critically important for things like raising sponsorship dollars for projects-such as a wildlife photo exhibit. If you would like to help, please consider “liking” my page? Or maybe sharing this FB post with your friends? For those of you who have already jumped on-board-I really do thank you! Cheers, NJ
We’re about to get our 50’000th follower ! It’s a huge achievement for all of us, we can now truly say that we’re helping Photographers getting noticed on Tumblr.
In fact every pictures we reblog get an average of 50 notes and sometimes over 28’000 notes (like this cool landscape shot). Our member count increased to 1000+ and we’re getting over 600 visitors per day. We also published our 6000th post today !
How to help us out
Here’s all the things you can do:
Your feedback is important
We’re also interested in hearing how Lensblr is helping you, what do you think of it and how you would improve it. You can either leave us a note or share your story by tagging it #whylensblr. We’ll reblog the best posts on our blog !
Sincerely, All the Lensblr staff
I put up a new “rough draft” for Lensblr’s About Page.
Lensblr Members — can you all do me a favor and read it over for typos, anything important I omitted, or anywhere I may have been too verbose (bad habit of mine!)
Lensblr staff & Volunteers — please make sure that I referenced your Tumblr and/or Name the way you would like.
If you have corrections, please do not “reply” to this post; send them to our ask box or email.
Thanks!
UPDATE: I see lots of people “Like” this idea, but I’m not getting very many people willing to volunteer to help with it! Really, you should help! Yes you, reading this right now! You could submit 1 great photo a day, or even 1 a week. We would love more people to participate in this! So let us know if you want to help! Read below!
We’re starting a new project called “Staff/Member Picks”.
Basically, the idea is the “staff” to choose a few photos from other photographers on Tumblr that they really like, and write a short commentary about why they chose that photo, highlight the elements that make it “good photography” etc.
I know many Lensblr members would like a way to be more “involved”. We think this is a good way — not too time consuming. And I also know a lot of photographers would like more feedback on their work. Last, hopefully it will add more diversity of photos, style and “substance” to Lensblr.
The rules are simple:
Prerequisites:
If you would like to participate (and you should!) please let us know by sending us an email (staff@lensblr.com). Tell us a bit about yourself. Oh, and be sure to include your Tumblr name.
Thanks!
Hello everyone,
Can I ask a favor to everyone who submits their photos to Lensblr by using the #lensblr tag on their posts?
Please, please: include some basic descriptive tags on your posts!
Just the basics will do: landscape, portrait, street photography, black and white, film, nature, urban, architecture, etc.
And no — “#photography”, ”#artists on tumblr”, ”#original photo”, ”#MyNameHere” — these are not descriptive tags! Feel free to use them of course, but include something descriptive.
Or for example, if you tag a photo with “sunset, sky, clouds, water, mountains” can you please include the #landscape tag? Try to include those simple broad categories too, please!
This will really save us lots of time having to manually add these basic tags to your posts before we can include them in our Submissions Review list.
As more and more people become part of Lensblr, and more and more people tag their posts with #lensblr, the lack of categorical tags is creating a lot of work for us. So, either you can help us out by putting these basic tags on your posts, or in the future we’ll just have to start ignoring those posts. I’m sorry, but that’s just what will happen eventually.
This does not apply to all of you, I know. Many of you tag your photos very well - and we appreciate that.
Thank you!
That’s a good question.
We “like” photos when we happen to be looking at the Dashboard, or at the tagged #lensblr page. When we “like” a photo it means we might reblog it. But we very rarely reblog things instantly when we see them.
We have our Tumblr set up so that whenever we “like” a post from any of our Members, that post is added to our big “Submissions List”
This big “Submissions List” is made up of:
- all the posts directly submitted
- many (not all) posts tagged #lensblr
- posts we see and we “like”
The “Submissions List” is reviewed by our Photo Editors. We’ve got about 20 people who help us as Photo Editors. Basically, they look over this big list of photos (170+ a day) and vote for their favorites. We wait about 4 days to give enough of our Editors the chance to look at each photo.
Finally, either Samuel or Felix looks at the choices made by our Editors, and we make the final decision on what to reblog. It’s not always a “majority rules” system. Some photos we pick because the majority of editors like them, others we pick because specific editors liked them, others we pick to get more variety, others we pick for… whatever reason we want. :)
So. Long answer short, we “like” people’s posts to 1) put them in this big Submissions List, and 2) just to remind you all that we’re here, and we’re real people too, and we do look at your posts on Tumblr :)
⬢
Really, that’s fantastic. We’re very glad — and also maybe a little surprised :) — that Lensblr could inspire you so much.
I feel a bit lost for words, because this is truly the kind of positive difference that we’ve been trying to make on Tumblr — it’s been our goal from day 1. I know we don’t always succeed, but we try, and I feel truly honored whenever we can inspire just one person in this way.
And as we always say: thanks isn’t to Lensblr itself - the thanks is to all the individual people that are part of our little community.
Looking forward to this mysterious “new project” Make sure to let us know what’s going on :)
Just a quick reminder for everyone!
I would just like to remind everyone that the easiest way to ‘submit’ your photos to Lensblr is to tag your posts with #lensblr
Why? We track that tag very carefully! No kidding - we have a computer program that downloads every post tagged #lensblr, and those posts go into the same list as all of our other Submissions.
Read this Fine Print:
IF you are a Member, we will always find your post if it’s tagged “#lensblr” because we Follow all of our members, and we download our Dashboard every 5 minutes so we never miss a single post.
However! if you are *not* a Member of Lensblr, you have to make sure that #lensblr is in the first 5 tags on your post or it will never get listed on the #Lensblr Page on Tumblr. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself and see!
Bottom line - we’re interested in all original photographers on Tumblr & we love reblogging your work. All you need to do is help us find your photos! Tagging your posts with #lensblr is the easiest way imaginable, right?
Do you know, we’ve got 20 volunteers who act as editors for photo submissions. They do a lot of hard work looking over 200+ photos every day to find the best photos to reblog.
But we would *love* to see more new faces and new people in our submissions! So Tag It, or Submit It.
Thanks! ⬢
Just a general announcement!
Ever since Lensblr was put on the Tumblr Photography Spotlight we’ve gained lots and lots of new followers — thousands of people!
So, to all of you who recently started following Lensblr, either from the Spotlight, or because you found us some other way, I’d like to tell you more about what Lensblr is!
Sunday project: “A trip through my eyes”
If there´s one thing I love about Tumblr and the amazing photogs community is that watching their work not only you get inspiration, but it is a very special way to “visit” other parts of the world, where they live.
There are some images that reflect to the core the essence of a place, images that hide stories, images that when a local would watch them would say “Oh yes, THIS is so ________ (insert the name of town/city/country here)”.
Here´s my photo, and the story behind it:
When the good weather starts to show in any part of Spain, you can see chairs out of the their houses, empty chairs waiting for the evening to come and their owners to sit in them in the cooler hours, usually elder people who just sit there and chat or simply watch people passing by. THIS is sooooooo Spain I don´t even….!
So I´m asking you all to take a photo (accompanied by a story) that resembles your country, or hometown. No matter what´s in it, it could be an abstract, food, urban…you name it.Post it in your blog and tag it with #a trip through my eyes or #sunday project and I will track these tags every week, then reblog ALL of them in my own blog, so I won´t be posting on Sundays my own stuff.
If the project is well received, I will make a book with all photos/stories for those who participated.
Are you in?
[See also: Laura’s Followup Post]
This is a great idea Laura! We can’t wait to see some of the photos you reblog from this project.
Lensblr Members, & other Photographers on Tumblr - sounds like a good opportunity to get a bit more exposure for your work!
Remember - when you tag a photo with #sunday project, you must make sure this tag is amongst the first 5 tags on your post or it will not show up on the #sunday project page for Laura to find it!
—Lensblr Team
It’s been a wild ride but after 165 days, 46’000 visitors, 150’000 pageviews and over 925 members we finally have our own little place on the glorious Tumblr spotlight under the Photography category along with other big names like LIFE, Photojojo!, dpreview and the Lomographic society.
A quick note from your humble Editors,
We have been extremely busy over the last weeks, barely managing to keep things running on Lensblr.
This is why a week or so ago we posted asking for help. Thanks to everyone to volunteered, and apologies we haven’t kept in communication more with those who did. We do need the help, and we do intend to bring on many new volunteers. However, we wish to do so in an orderly manner; and as you all know, managing a group of people requires its own investment of time and energy — time we simply haven’t been able to give in the last weeks. But we will soon, so please bear with us.
Also, to everyone who wrote us emails or sent letters to our Tumblr inbox: we will answer you as soon as we possibly can. We’ve got quite a backlog of letters to answer. To be honest, we’ve got quite a backlog of everything at the moment: new member submissions, photo submissions, etc.
We’re doing the best we can, and soon we will have much more help from all those who generously offered to volunteer.
In the meantime, please excuse us for a few more days while we strike balance between our personal lives and our roles as Lensblr’s Editors.
Thanks. ⬢
I’m not sure how many of you track any of the “Edited Tagged pages” (like #Black and White, #Landscape, #Portrait ) on your Dashboard.
If you don’t know, unlike all the other “tag” pages (say, #hasselblad), these special categories are moderated / edited by fellow Tumblr users, so only a select number of posts are chosen to be “Featured”. You can actually see exactly who those editors are, too.
But getting to the point. A few days ago I posted how awesome it was to see a bunch of our members featured in #Black and White. And yes, it is great. But what I should have stressed more was that it was awesome seeing some photographers on Tumblr getting featured — rather than the same blogs again and again uploading images from Flickr.
Go over to the #Black and White page right now and you’ll see a bunch more original Photographers on Tumblr featured there today.
We think this is great, a step in the right direction for the Tumblr community as whole. And it’s particularly important for those people who are the creators on Tumblr to get a bit more exposure.
So far, I’m only observing this in #Black and White. But I hope that it’s an indication of a sea change in how Editors choose some of the posts they Feature.
Tumblr’s slogan “Follow the world’s creators.” often strikes me as a bit ironic, when so many of the people who are the creators on Tumblr are not followed by anyone at all. Of course, there’s tons of talent everywhere, not just on Tumblr. But there are a lot talented photographers on Tumblr too, just like there are talented #Artists on Tumblr. (It seems Photographers aren’t really considered “Artists” by those Editors, with a few exceptions)
That’s why we created Lensblr, but we’re not alone in pushing this idea. Good thing, because we can’t do it alone.
So we’re happy to see some of the Tumblr Editors responsible for Featuring posts standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us supporting this idea, because Featured posts can draw a lot of attention to those original photographers on Tumblr. Attention that is, far too often, neglected.
As part of this, we’d also like to start a collection of links to other Tumblrs that share this goal. We know a couple, but you all probably know of many others. Send us their links so we can share them with everybody.
⬢
LENSBLR
