It is with some sense of sadness that I have decided to leave DA; I have been a member here for over 5 years now (1709 days as a member, and prior to that I was on another account), and I believed I have developed a lot as a photographer since then. I actually do a lot more than photography; I do videography and writing yet deviantart isn’t really an appropriate avenue for all of these.
I started off uploading stuff I was doing for art in high school and since then have moved onto photography as a hobby and that as what I would refer to it now, a professional hobby. It’s humorous for me to see my pet obsession with fisheye photography back in the day, I have moved on since then quite a bit (I went all the way from fisheye up to being obsessed with my 200mm 2.8L, which I’m still obsessed with).
Having recently looked back upon my photography I have realized I have been far too critical on myself and have loosened up my standards and started to learn a bit more about the crop tool.
One thing I would note about DA is that it is its own little clique on the internet right now, everyone else seems to use blog formats or their own domain or whatever they want.
I have probably been more fortunate than most other photographers being that I have had access to most of the best equipment I could imagine, I haven't ever doubted how lucky I have been in that regard. I have taken the time to try and learn as much as possible and now I probably know enough to start teaching others (which is something I do on occasion).
I would like to thank all the people who made comments on my photographs, and in particular those who offered criticism because I believe that is one of the most difficult things to offer. I would also like to thank the friends I have made through DA.
So, why am I leaving DA?
It has become more and more difficult to stand out on DA, I was used to having a few comments per deviation which has dwindled to just 1 or no comments at all. Probably the plethora of anime style stuff on DA has made it difficult to stand out as a photographer as well as the photographers who are more inclined to using photoshop than taking actual photographs (in my opinion anyway).
Unfortunately I think deviantart as a site has worsened in the past few years, the design is unrecognizable and is more geared towards people looking for a social network rather than getting criticism and feedback that is professional in some capacity (like Vimeo, they have taken steps to keep their site more professionally oriented and that's why I have forked out for a professional membership over there). If DA had more of a professional crowd I’d be a bit more enthusiastic, but it doesn’t seem to.
The site doesn’t even work on Chrome or Internet Explorer properly—I haven’t been able to load comments or anything for the past several months because the design is so screwed up and over complicated. Miraculously the site works fine in Firefox which has a lesser share than Internet Explorer.
When it gets to the point that I have to deactivate my adblocked (which already has deviantart.com as an exception) and use another browser, what’s the point?
The navigation of the site is now confused as fuck, just looking at the link bar on every page, I have the choice of “shop, devwear, collections, critiques, critiqueable, channels, chat, news, today, forum, help, more”; There’s no shortage of shit in the more section, what is all that shit I just listed out? There is just too much stuff on this site now, it is really unidentifiable to me; I guess the lesson is that you can’t be all things at once, you can’t have a poetry community with an anime community with a Photoshop community with a photographers community and expect to get a good result.
Probably more than ironic is the fact that within the UAE I was practically responsible for getting the website unblocked at one stage (a few years back I wrote an article and interviewed some Etisalat guy and poked a bit about it). I do however somewhat wish it was blocked again.
I’m not even sure that I have copies of my older work anymore, so in some ways DA is a useful archive.
I will not stop taking photographs, indeed I shall be taking far more photographs, but they will not be shared on here. I am moving towards a more professional portfolio site at the moment, I will not be posting the link publicly, but maybe if you like my work enough you can email me and I’ll email you the link when it’s all ready.
So anyway, that was my diatribe. Ciao.