A couple of things… I was researching some new articles I’m writing, and went back to one of my favorite essays, Ken Rockwell’s The Seven Levels of Photographers for inspiration. I noticed that he recently added a level 0 to this, having found a new level below level 1, The Equipment Measurbator. Level 0 is “Online Expert or Armchair Photographer.” This type of person doesn’t really know anything about photography, but is quite happy to foist his or her opinion upon the Internet masses. I filed it away as interesting, but not particularly relevant to me, until today when I was going through my online portfolio cleaning up the comment spam. I found this comment on Watchful Wings:
| From: | Heidi DK | (Sat 14 Oct 2006 09:45:26 AM EDT) |
| I like the photo – but I think it would be even nicer if you didn’t edited it so much – it looks fake, and I think what is beautiful about a picture is when it is so good, that you don’t have to edit it. | ||
What a coincidence. I think what is beautiful about a picture is when it is so good that you don’t have to edit it too! 😉
This is precisely why I hate having comments for photos on a site. Is it up to US to educate every single person who thinks they know better? Why should we have to edit comments from our own sites on a regular basis because of this?
What would be cool is if someone could write a script server-side that would automatically delete comments that are false in statement or whatnot.
But then again, in today’s world I guess if we decide to enable comments, taking time out to go over them and clean them up is part of the deal.
I’ve taken a slightly different approach. I clean up the comments that are links to people selling drugs and other random spam junk, but I generally leave the idiot comments alone. I don’t reply to them though. Sometimes other people come along and smack the idiots down, but I don’t think it’s worth my time to engage in a conversation with them. Right now my site has a “blacklist” that is supposed to filter out a lot of the junk comments, but it mainly catches robots, not ignorance 🙂
I think she was referring to the frame, Kev. There was obviously no frame hanging from the tree, now was there. HMMM?? 😛