I’ve been browsing through Photography > People&Portraits, looking for a photo I once saw but forgot to +fav it. And then I got stumped by the sub-categories — they apparently didn’t mean the same thing to different photographers.
To my uneducated eyes, there’s little difference between ‘Emotive‘ and ‘Expressive‘ photos. Understandable, because the descriptions of these two categories leave the interpretation rather subjective.
In some other categories that should have quite clearer borders, however, I am utterly confused. I have no idea how ‘classical’ is defined in ‘Classic Portraits’ description, or ‘spontaneous’ in ‘Spontaneous Portraits’. Reading the descriptions was educational, but hardly helpful.
In the ‘Classic Portraits‘ case, most photographers seem to see the word ‘classic’ and run away with it. This means the category is overrun by photos of people in period clothings, famous (or would-be famous) photos (as in being seen on the internet for a long period of time[1]), and some others that beg for a question: which dictionary are you using, exactly?
While browsing in ‘Spontaneous Portraits‘, I amused myself by imagining the photographer stopping the time to adjust the pose, arrange the props to his heart’s content, then flicking the time right on and shooting.Or surely, if there’s at least a single strand of hair out of place, a blade of grass stuck on the leggings, the photograph could be considered ‘spontaneous’.
After awhile, the best practice for using DeviantArt Browse is to come up with my own descriptions, trying to match the categories with the general trends of posted works.
This is actually fun :)
‘Artistic Nude‘: more in-your-face nude than usual
‘Classic Portrait‘: photographer’s favourite works
‘Emotive‘: mostly moody-sad-contemplative close-ups and, unsurprisingly, lots of ‘emo’
‘Expressive‘: like emotive, but more mime-like
‘Miscellaneous‘: posted by honest photographers who admit to not knowing what the fuss these categories are about.
‘Costplay‘: clothes that normal people won’t wear to church on Sunday.
‘Pin up‘: I rather like this. It’s mostly girls in minuscule clothes with provocative poses, posted by frank photographers with no pretension to be ‘artistic’.
—-
[1] This generates even more confusion to me, since a measure of ‘long time’ is definitely relative on the internet, without the need to proof Einstein’s General Relativity Theory. Nowadays, something being circulated around for two weeks can be ‘classic’.
