White Light: What Does a Lack of Comments Really Mean?

Last night, Chiaroscuro, Visual Field, ViSuaLLy MiNDeD, and I got together to discuss our mutual love of photography and our general sense that we really don't know what we're doing!

We looked at photographs, both our own and others, in print and online, and talked about what we liked and didn't like, hoping to learn from each other's reactions. When our own photographs would fail us, we talked about other photobloggers that we liked (I had my links page all revved up and ready to go). Overall, we generally agreed with each other's choices of favorite photoblogs, feeling like it was fairly easily to identify what we liked and disliked. The hard part was in figuring out how to reproduce that quality in our own photos.

(One burning question that we were left with is: Is C h r o m a s i a pronounced Chromazzzia, with the stress on "maz", or Chrome-Asia, like the continent?)

Chiaroscuro then brought up an interesting issue - what to make of photos that don't receive any comments? Should we interpret lack of comments as a polite consensus that the photo wasn't any good? She drew our attention to this post (photo shown here), which didn't receive any comments. I claimed never to have seen this picture before in my life, but after looking at the text, I remembered that I had checked her photoblog that day and had read this post. Perhaps the same reason I didn't remember the picture was the same reason I hadn't commented on the picture? Was it just not striking enough? Especially when compared her other (amazing) photos? Visual Field suggested that maybe people didn't really know what to say in response to this photo - "nice trees"? But no one was willing to say that we didn't like the photo, because the truth was that we did like it. Someone suggested cropping the picture so that the water in the background was no longer or only barely showing. We tried it out and everyone reacted to the result - much better! It must have been that the background was distracting and we just didn't realize it at first!

But really, who knows if that's what viewers were thinking. Maybe the people who visited her site that day just didn't feel like saying anything that time. Maybe some of those same people stopped by my site and still had nothing to say (see examples of my own posts without commments here, here, here, and here) Or maybe they just hated those pictures! I really don't know.

However, my feeling (and I think every else's) is that we shouldn't read too much into a lack of comments, but at the same time, it must be true that the picture wasn't striking enough to motivate a viewer to say something about it. There may be some truth to the idea that if someone doesn't like the picture they might prefer just to say nothing at all. But just because no one said anything, I don't think we can assume the photo was generally disliked.

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What Does a Lack of Comments Really Mean?	December 14, 2004
Last night, Chiaroscuro, Visual Field, ViSuaLLy MiNDeD, and I got together to discuss our mutual love of photography and our general sense that we really don't know what we're doing! We looked at photographs, both our own and others, in print and online, and talked about what we liked and didn't like, hoping to learn from each other's reactions. When our own photographs would fail us, we talked about other photobloggers that we liked (I had my links page all revved up and ready to go). Overall, we generally agreed with each other's choices of favorite photoblogs, feeling like it was fairly easily to identify what we liked and disliked. The hard part was in figuring out how to reproduce that quality in our own photos. (One burning question that we were left with is: Is C h r o m a s i a pronounced Chromazzzia, with the stress on "maz", or Chrome-Asia, like the continent?) Chiaroscuro then brought up an interesting issue - what to make of photos that don't receive any comments? Should we interpret lack of comments as a polite consensus that the photo wasn't any good? She drew our attention to this post (photo shown here), which didn't receive any comments. I claimed never to have seen this picture before in my life, but after looking at the text, I remembered that I had checked her photoblog that day and had read this post. Perhaps the same reason I didn't remember the picture was the same reason I hadn't commented on the picture? Was it just not striking enough? Especially when compared her other (amazing) photos? Visual Field suggested that maybe people didn't really know what to say in response to this photo - "nice trees"? But no one was willing to say that we didn't like the photo, because the truth was that we did like it. Someone suggested cropping the picture so that the water in the background was no longer or only barely showing. We tried it out and everyone reacted to the result - much better! It must have been that the background was distracting and we just didn't realize it at first! But really, who knows if that's what viewers were thinking. Maybe the people who visited her site that day just didn't feel like saying anything that time. Maybe some of those same people stopped by my site and still had nothing to say (see examples of my own posts without commments here, here, here, and here) Or maybe they just hated those pictures! I really don't know. However, my feeling (and I think every else's) is that we shouldn't read too much into a lack of comments, but at the same time, it must be true that the picture wasn't striking enough to motivate a viewer to say something about it. There may be some truth to the idea that if someone doesn't like the picture they might prefer just to say nothing at all. But just because no one said anything, I don't think we can assume the photo was generally disliked.

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