An expressive platform

Picture perfect

People use blogs as a means of self-expression, but there are those to whom words don’t easily come. Instead, they use photos to describe their feelings and interests better, and blogs comprised purely of photos,  also known as photoblogs, have been gaining popularity in the last decade.

“Photography has always been interesting to me. It enables me to show people how I see the world. Sounds cliched, I know, but it’s my way of capturing beauty in the smallest of places,” says Trishal Reddy, whose blog, though relatively new, has a plethora of pictures.

Can pictures really makeup for words, however? Harshit Pai seems to think so. “I use photos to express myself, which I can’t do very well with words. With photoblogs, the focus is on the picture and not the writing - the photograph tells its own story,” he says. A common thread amongst young photographers thus seems to be that they let their photographs speak for themselves, without being weighed down by a number of paragraphs.

More and more photographers are using online platforms to not only share their work but showcase it as well. “My blog helped me show my work when I applied for an internship as a photojournalist,” says Harshit. Their photoblogs thus double as easy-access, inexpensive portfolios that can be updated with just a click of the mouse.

Either the blogs are on free platforms, like Tumblr or Blogspot, or can be leased for a minimal fee, like GoDaddy or Wix.com. There’s even a dedicated site for the art of photoblogging, Photoblog.com, that caters to the modern photographer. Photoblogs have an eco-friendly vein too - you don’t need to print your pictures to show them to people.

The kind of photographs these shutterbugs upload can be considered parts of themselves. “I believe that creativity is what sets a picture apart from the rest. That’s why I consider my photography to be abstract. I want to do something than nobody else can,” says Trishal. The trend of experimental photography is quickly coming up everywhere in the industry, and photoblogs are the go-to mediums for documenting it.

What does the future hold for these up-and-coming blogs? “I want my photoblog to double as a tutorial blog so that I can show budding photographers that they don’t need expensive equipment to take good pictures,” says Trishal. “Instead, the message I want to send is that functionality and creativity can go hand-in-hand when it comes to clicking photographs.”

Harshit wants to take his photoblog a step further. “I want to start a collaboration between writers, photographers and artists to get the whole feel of the arts,” he says. What better way to do so than through a photoblog? After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!