This is a part of a series called 101 tips to make you a better photographer.

Tip #5 of 101: Joining a photo community to share your photos
(AKA some tips to show off your photos and earn some bragging rights from other photographers using free stuff)

Tip related to: Marketing and Promotion
Photography skill required: Beginners, Intermediate, Advanced
Camera feature required: Any camera, useful even if you take photos using your mobile phone
Special requirement: You will need a computer with Windows (any version) or Linux or Mac, even a mobile phone with internet access

Now that you have bought a camera, learned to lock the focus and post process your images, now is the time to share your photos with the world and in the process, learn, get motivated and find a reason to click photos all the time.

There are three steps for sharing your photos with the world
1. Join a photo sharing community such as Flickr and get exposed to other photography enthusiasts
2. Share your photos and your thoughts and opinions on your own blog
3. Discuss your photos and your photography adventures with fellow photo enthusiasts on a local forum.

And finally, we will talk about how much to worry about somebody stealing your photos and what you can do about it.

Let us look at each step one by one.

In today’s tip, we will talk about joining a photo community, specially Flickr and some tips to increase the exposure of your photos there.

Why join a photo community

When you are a pro photographer, your daily bread depends on the time you spend with your camera.
For us, amateurs, there is no such restriction.

A typical scenario that we face is

• You buy the latest super mega zoom/mega pixel camera
• You take hundreds of photos
• Your wife/friends/family appreciate the first few photos for a few days and then as the volume of photos increases, you don’t find anybody interested in your photos anymore.
• Very soon, you remember that the report that you boss asked you to prepare is getting delayed due to the time you spend with your camera.
• And finally, after you have taken a photo of your wife, friends, all the flowers in your garden and your neighbors garden, your dog etc you run out of steam and get the photographers block.
  You simply run out of ideas or subjects to take photos of.
• And then you start to drift away from your camera and your hobby.

A community of fellow photographers, takes care of all this.

You meet other people like you, you learn, you get inspired, you see that somebody took a better picture of the same subject that you shot yesterday, you give your opinion and receive critique from others.

Each positive comment on your photo will motivate you to take more, each negative comment will help you improve.

All this ensures that you never run out of steam and always have ideas and reasons to shoot more photos.

Why Flickr?

Although there are hundreds of photo community, my personal opinion is that the first step of your photo sharing journey must always start with Flickr [www.Flickr.com]

Flickr has the largest community of photo enthusiasts on the net.

• It means that if you share your photos there, a lot of people will see your photos and give their comments and opinions.

• Flickr also enables you to have private photos that can be seen only by friends and family.

• Finally, Flickr acts like a free online storage for your photos that you can show from your own website or blog.
  This will be an important thing when you plan to host your own photo blog.
  All the photos that you see on my blog are hosted at Flickr.

Here are the steps for getting started with Flickr.

1. Signup on Flickr by clicking the “create your own account” link on the home page.
   Basic accounts are free and it enables you to share upto 200 photos.
   That is more than enough to start with.
2. After signing up, click on the link called “Upload photos” from the home page.
3. Always add suitable titles, description and keywords to your photos.
   It enables the viewers to get an idea of what you were thinking when you took the photo.
   It also increases your chances of getting positive feedback from other members.
4. After you have uploaded and organized your photos and given it suitable titles, descriptions etc, you should explore the groups of Flickr.
   Groups are collections of people with some common interest.
   You can search for groups by clicking on the Groups menu near the top of the page.
5. Join as many groups as you can and submit your photo to all the relevant groups.
   Don’t forget to read the rules of each group before joining.
   When you share your photos in the groups your photos get instant exposure to hundreds of people with similar taste.
6. Participate in the discussion forums in those groups. It will help you become a part of that community and will increase your credibility and social circle there.
7. Look at the photos of other people and comment on their work.
   A thumb rule about commenting that I follow is that my comments should never hurt the photographers ego.
   If you do not like something, then tell in a positive manner what you did not like and how, in your opinion, it could have been improved.
8. To see some interesting photos on Flickr, Look at http://www.flickrleech.net Select a date and click Go. It will show you all the interesting photos of that day.
9. If you like some photographer, you can view the profile of that person and know more about him/her.
10. If you want to be notified whenever that person adds a new photo, you can add him as your contact.
    This will ensure that whenever that person adds a photo, you will be informed about it.
    Whenever you add somebody as your contact, you will get an option to select the person as a friend or family.
    If you make a contact your friend or family, then these people can see the photos that you restrict for friends or family.
11. If you do not want to share the photos with other members on Flickr, click on the photo in flickr and set the view permission by clicking on the options on the right hand side column of the page.
    You will see an option called “Additional Information”. you will get the option to change the permission there.
    You can set the permission so that the file can be seen by friends, family, all or nobody.
12. The final thing to remember is to set appropriate license to your photos. If you want to share your photos and allow others to copy and use it (with credit to you, of course), you should set the license to Creative Commons, otherwise set the license to “None, all rights reserved” i.e. copyrighted photo.
    This will save you a lot of legal headaches in future.
    You can set the permissions from the options on the right, under the “Additional Information” heading.
    In the future posts, I will discuss about the benefits of setting the license as “Creative Commons”, specially if you are an amateur.

That is it for today.
I hope you have fun exploring flickr and the photos there.

In the next step, we will take it one step further i.e. create our own photo blog.

My last tip was: Tip #4 of 101: Basics of post processing your photos - Part 2

List of all the tips: 101 tips to make you a better photographer

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If you have any questions or want to share your photos, post them in the comments section below.

Take care,
Gunjan