I’m a little jaded by freelancing for companies that just kept saying “grab it off Flickr, it’s free” and not understanding different levels of CC in the working environment. So it’s made me a little cautious. Still, it’s something I have to investigate Jin, for sure.

As for Pros using sites like Flickr. What I’ve seen over the years, even before Flickr is that some Pros put a very small but brand defining collection on photos.net or deviantart, as a way of advertising. Then people who admire their works would go to their mainsite. I think it may be a good way of marketing.

Having only 1 image achieves two objectives. It stops my having to pay for excessive bandwidth. Second, it creates an effort for collecting a set. Someone has to come back to grab the next one, as opposed to just grabbing them in a set. Which takes effort. Which most people would tire of quickly. While that definately sounds a little paranoid, I confess, I’ve been burned in the past. So it’s not unreasonable to respect the Creative Commons that a person chooses, really. Yes I’ll get ripped, one image at a time potentially. But at the same time I’m agreeing to share quite widely within certain boundaries.

As it stands though, I can’t afford to maintain the bandwidth. And I had to take the full images out of the RSS feed too.

My point then was simply that given a non-Flickr environment even average high quality large images sell themselves.

It’s the same argument that if you were a web designer and had a Geocities account then it’s not the best of starts… kind of…

So, professionally speaking, because nowdays we are what we sell in a real sense, if one were to be selling photography – all things being equal – then Flickr is not the format to be displaying them to the world IMO. From a marketing perspective. Sitting in the same generic design as 6 billion other photos has to be detrimental to your brand.

However, you can social network very effectively and achieve those goals. I’d probably suggest that a unique brand / site plus a social networking strategy would be a good way to go.

I’m in post shock of not being able to buy a lense I was only looking at a couple of days ago on the shelf. Ha. That’s the way of the quiet parts of the world.

As about Flickr. I honestly didn’t think too much about it before, since I mostly used facebook, or google to store photos and to share with friends and family.

I only got more heavily involved with Flickr(eventually got the Pro) account after I got the D90. I’m sure everyone uses it for different reasons. For me, for now, it’s about learning. I find the Nikon groups are very friendly and helpful. It’s just a lot easier to post a pic from Flickr and have people critique it.

Flickr, like all social media sites, is basically what you make of it IMHO. Took me forever to “get” Twitter. But there’s the issue about creative common as you mentioned. I agree as long as you put your work out there, people will rip it. Then again, if you publish any photo on your own site(even one at a time), your photos may have the same fate too.

Over all, I’m very pleased with Flickr. I’m more drawn to its community than the application side.