Full Extended Interview by The Orconomist with yours truly

I made my first post to Steemit on May 13th, and have been interacting and posting like mad ever since.

I’d been looking at micropayment solutions for content for a bit, and also had been spending a lot of time on the Dogecoin subreddit just stacking up those doge from tips, and I tipped others quite a lot too. I was following the Akasha and Yours.Network projects very closely, neither of which are public yet. I think I found Steemit through the RedditAlternatives, or it may have been while reading up on micropayments.

When I arrived I was just blown away by the numbers on some posts, including a couple of mine. I thought “This can’t be real, those numbers are like Dogecoin, $500 = 5cents or something." But nope!

When July 4th came around, it was amazing to see all the payouts and the increase in userbase. The platform really grew overnight with all the hype and the introduction posts by the boatload.

I wasn’t sure how long it would last, and it’s still such early days. Excited to see what comes in the future.

The first SPC was completely spur of the moment. In the first post I mentioned that “The point is to generate more content for the photography tag and interaction on the posts.” and I thought it would be cool to get together with photographers to have a little fun. I had not planned to include prizes, just a fun community event that people could interact with and share work around a theme. Here is the first mention of it(I was hacked right afterwards just as the post was gaining traction, so ignore that comment at the top :) )

So, the post was basically “Hey guys, it would be cool to do a weekly challenge around a theme, and we can highlight the best entries, what do you think?” and @berniesanders came along to donate 150 Steem towards the winners. He has really taken a personal interest in the photography section in particular, and other creative projects that Steemians come up with. That really kicked it off and made it into what it is now. The hype around winning a large prize really drew a lot of people to it. At the time Steem was about $3.60 so the prizes were worth over $1200USD total because I took @berniesanders’ donation and matched it using the post rewards — which has been the mechanic for the challenge since then. The majority of the liquid rewards go back in as prizes. It would be remiss if I did not mention the other donors for the first challenge, @moose and @discombobulated. I don’t know if they are still around!

I don’t have a professional photography background but I’ve been dabbling since I got my first point and shoot for Christmas 2003. I think it was a 3.2MP Sony Cybershot. Since then I’ve dropped out of basic film photography courses and done advanced photography workshops instead. I like to jump in the deep end, for some reason. I worked as photographer’s assistant for a bit as well where I picked up a lot of stuff, all while practicing like crazy on my own. Used to curate a photography inspiration blog for a couple years, which exposed me to a lot of amazing work.

I won third place in a National photography competition, which I was upset about!! Mostly digital work, but I’ve experimented with expired films and completely manual old film cameras. Never commercial, always personal art for the pleasure of it.

I’m still learning all the time.

I expected people to get sick of them, to be honest. But with the continued support of the community, working closely with @berniesanders and others, I intend to keep it going for some time. We’re coming up to #10 and have a special prize giveaway lined up

That’s a really tough one. I suppose the very first one is the one I remember the clearest since it was all new and exciting and the image just stood out to me. I’m talking about @sharker’s monkey entry which can be seen here in the SPC#1 Winners post.

By the way, you can read a very interesting interview with @sharker here

^{Photo by @sharker}

Other than that, I would point people to all the previous winners + mentions that I have been the judge for. Those are all my favourites out of the hundreds of entries each week!

The Viewfinder Steemzine is a project that I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks as a way to further the goals of the SPC while experimenting with a new method and format. Plus, it’s fun, creates and distributes value to others, and is a way to generate a bit of side-income for myself. “Mutual self-interest” is a term that I learned early on Steemit from @dan, and it stuck with me.

From the introductory post:

“It will be a bi-weekly (once every two weeks) ezine available exclusively on Steemit featuring the work of ‘local’ photographers and writers on various topics within photography.

The purpose is to further explore the potential of the platform for showcasing the work of photographers, those interested in photography, and of course to provide inspiration to readers. Secondly, it is to create and distribute value to users on the platform working in the field of photography by providing opportunities for high value curators to utilise voting power effectively, basically hitting many birds with one stone.”

The project will pay for chosen work with percentages of liquid rewards.

Visit the introductory post to get more details.

I haven’t really given that much thought, it remains to be seen how successful the Viewfinder will be. I’ve already got some support from high value account holders and expect that more will support it because of the stated goals and the high quality that I expect it to bring out.

Ideally I’d like to keep them distinct from one another, hitting different aspects and levels of the photography culture of Steemit. I suspect that they both will evolve over time rather than Viewfinder replacing the SPC. If the Viewfinder becomes so popular that it takes too much of my time, I would likely delegate more. We’ll see how it goes!