Wikimania

Critical issues presentations/How Commons made a quality photographer out of me

< Critical issues presentations
Submission no. 184
Title of the submission

How Commons made a quality photographer out of me

Author of the submission
  • Diego Delso
Country of origin

Germany

Topics

Projects

Keywords
  • Photography
  • Wikimedia Commons
  • Commons
  • Quality Image
  • Featured Picture
  • Learning
Abstract

I arrived to Commons in 2008 and uploaded aprox. 5,000 photographs over a few years. I believed that they were good pictures but at the same time I was amazed by the great shots that were shown day by day in the main project page of Commons. End of 2011 I came across a page called Quality images candidates and was surprised and delighted to see that there you would get a prompt feedback from experienced users about the quality of your pictures. I tried my luck but all my first candidates were declined, mostly due to reasons like perspective problems, bad crop, noisy or chromatic aberration that I couldn't even realize at full side. It took me a while to see those problems, and longer to understand how to fix them. I got help from a lot of experienced and patient photographers and learned something new everyday. By now I have visited a bunch of photography courses but haven't learned by far what I have learned in Commons in the last years. Today, I feel comfortable with different kind of photography, from macro to architecture over panoramas or HDR, both in the photography techniques and in the post-processing phase. Now I am the user with most Quality Images (approx. 8000) and Featured Pictures (260) in Commons, and now it is me who helps others in one of the best photography learning platforms I could imagine. The best of all: participating is free, we achieve lots of free-licensed material and you never stop learning! :)

In this contribution I will show the before-after of my contributions in Commons and I will explain what I have learned thanks to Commons and how that learning process is fostered in the project. I have held this talk in Wikimania '14 and '15. See the slides here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:How_Wikimedia_Commons_made_a_quality_photographer_out_of_me.pdf

Result

Not accepted

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