Will Knott

A little background for you. I stopped using Facebook a while back due to lack of interest. Recently I’ve updated my version of Tweetdeck, which now allows cross posting of your updates to both Twitter and Facebook.

I cross-posted that I had uploaded my photowalk photos, and the question arose (from my dead account); “What is a photowalk?”

Well, generally a photowalk is what it says on the tin. Two or more people get together and go for a walk taking photos. In practice, the walk portion can be replaced

But what makes that different from the clichéd image of a hoard of tourists snapping everything in site, including each other? (Yes, photobloggers take photographs of the other photowalkers).

So I posted the question on Twitter. And a few replies came back.

Tommy pointed out that “In my experience, photowalks are done by people from the same country. Also, tourists want keepsakes, p’walkers want good quality pix”. Given that the organiser of the Dublin photowalk isn’t from the Republic of Ireland, this isn’t quite true. Besides, I think that I have a few “keepsakes” in my collection. This was promptly followed by an invitation for the usual Irish photowalkers to go on a photowalk in Amsterdam. So there goes that definition.

McAWilliams then chimed in with “generally we take good photos and not snapshots!”. The “generally” then had a little discussion. Maybe photowalkers edit the results (literally edit the photos and not just sort them in to a ‘display’ and a ‘hide’ pile).

Eventually K.E. Southall came up with my favoured definition “photowalk = pre-emptive gathering of like-minded folk snapping random things. Tourists snap loved ones in front of famous sites”.

And she is right. Photowalkers tend to snap strangers that they find interesting, sometimes in unknown places.

And sometimes not even people.

But certainly random.

Click,
Will Knott

Tags: mcawilliams, photo, photo editing, photography, photowalk, southall, trust tommy

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Cork City, Web development, photo, photo editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.