Clay Shirky was making a larger point, but I was intrigued by this mention of high dynamic range photography, which was new to me:
The community of practice that I love is the high dynamic range (HDR) photography people on Flickr. Back in the old days, if some new photographic technique came along, it would take 5-7 years to spread from someone’s photo studio to photo magazines, and finally to widespread visibility in Popular Photography, and the average darkroom.You could see the high dynamic range technique, where you take multiple exposures of the same scene and combine them to get the brightest brights and the darkest darks, rip through Flickr, where people were posting these photos, and someone would come along, and say “Oh, my god, that’s the greatest photo I’ve ever seen, I love it. How did you do that?” And then you had these threads that were thousands and tens of thousands of words long with pointers to external software, and other people posting images in the thread that would help illustrate things.
This community sprung up around high dynamic range photography, and they essentially explained it to themselves in the course of about three months. HDR photography went from being something that a handful of people knew how to do to a general technique that any photographer who’s willing to spend an afternoon on Flickr could pick up and understand. And the speed of that spread wouldn’t work if money were involved.