One less thing to maintain.
I finally did it. I closed my account on 500px. And I'm relieved somewhat. After weeks of contemplating, the app icon staring at me when I'm on my phone. Opening Lightroom several times a week, seeing the 1.536 photos to sort through and work on. I kept being confronted with this mountain of work. I'm in the amazonian jungle for the past weeks, my thoughts kept returning to the feeling I wrote about earlier. The pressure I put on myself, to only publish whatever is perfect. I remember clearly publishing a few of my first photos on 500px, seeing the stats change over the next few hours. Popular/uprising categories, more likes receiving, until it died down due the photo being published a few days ago. Of course I was excited, I got some validation for what I published and I was happy with the result myself.
Looking at all of them today, I'm still fairly satisfied with most, but it's not at the point where I want them to be. Truly amazing. Like professional-grade-ish. I know I'm able, if I had more time. If I didn't put this bar so high I would get there. The past few weeks, I've been thinking about this. The thing I remember the most, was the number of likes. Then I thought of this blog, the indieweb. Having a public photography portfolio under my name not what I really want. I even contemplated on giving up on photography completely. Especially with this amount of photos I have collected over the past 4 years and in 2024? Nothing I wanted to keep, I didn't travel enough either for it but still.
Then there's the uprising of AI, I think this sparked this whole letting go journey in the first place now that I'm scribbling down this. I came across a stock photo website, all generated by AI. Of course most of them look amazing, exactly what everyone likes to see, including myself. I look at my own photos. I can't compete. I spiraled down to "Why even bother, do I really enjoy photography?". I remembered my father taking his anologue camera every where on our trips. Developing the negatives when we came home, being happy with the holiday photos. When I was younger and got my first camera, I went out and did the same. I wanted to capture what I was seeing in things. I've had several phases of this, but I always went back to doing photography. When we started traveling the world, it felt like a perfect fit. Amazing places to explore, to photograph. Moments to capture. It was never intended for social media, as I don't have any anymore but I do feel some photos are kind of precious to me. I will let the idea sink in of starting some photolog somewhere on the indieweb, small and simple. Something for myself, without a way to track views/likes since I basically don't want to know..
Not sure what I was trying to write down eventually, got a bit side tracked. I feel weird these past days, kind of stuck. These weeks I would be spending here, I was pretending to do a little more soul searching and go through some things. But it's not happening yet, I feel a bit more like I'm surviving instead. I'm still working my day job too, it probably doesn't help. Was hoping to have more space to write a bit more too, but hey I'm writing now at least.
Ah well, at least I managed to get to the conclusion that I don't want 500px anymore and from now on I might be able to sort a bit faster through my Lightroom collection, with the idea of only keeping photos I would like to work on instead of ones that might have some "business-value".