Reply To: Fauxtogs who should end up on the main page…

[fstopper89]

Yeah, in a way, Ricky Cain basically threatened to report “us” and get “our page” shut down… I mean wtf dude, this isn’t our page, and nothing that any of us (at least myself) did warrants any sort of reporting. He had also made roundabout threats in fewer words that he would do something to damage my business or my name because of what I was telling him about his work via private message! Now THAT is clearly slander.

I did message him first about removing the images he took down from other photogs’ Flickr pages. He claimed that he thought it was ok, because he uses some kind of Flickr-based downloader that only takes the images that are NOT marked “all rights reserved.” But I told him that he had images that clearly stated all rights reserved, and because of that, the photographer did not allow others to download/use their image and that while what he was doing couldn’t be classified quite as illegal, it was in really bad taste. He thanked me and then asked how I liked his HDR images. Once he got a dose of honesty, he became extremely defensive, and began attempts at personal attacks against me. I wasn’t even being overly harsh in my critiques… I mean let me tell you, I could have been really mean! To me, his work screams “look, I can make my camera take a picture with a really shallow depth of field, how cool is that, let me take a picture of the side of an office building with that technique and call it art!” and not to mention his “HDR” photos of his garbage cans in his backyard. There was nothing redeeming about any of those. He had photos taken from some kind of political dinner banquet, and they were all dark and soft, and had no artistic or even much documentary merit. But, because he doesn’t like the “look” of any photo shot with an ISO higher than 100, he won’t dare change it (and instead end up with blurry dark photos!). Then he wanted to vent about his life story or something to me and I told him I was solely going to talk about photography. He said that in 10-20 years we should compare photography to see who has gotten further but he will always be better or something because he travels the world. I was never trying to make it a contest about how awesome our lives were nor do I have a clue why he even went there. I think the dude’s really lonely to be honest. I feel kind of bad for him. He’d probably benefit from making friends with local photogs or taking photography classes/workshops.

Then he messaged me again demanding I “call off my cadre.” When I told him I know none of you in real life he said there must be some “loose association.” Ugh. Claiming I had power to tell all these people who were “spamming” and leaving negative comments on his site, and that I was responsible. Well for one, I didn’t post the original link to his page here. I told him maybe he should try taking responsibility for himself and asking those people to stop leaving spam on his site.