Tumblr is known as the site for professional fashion and portrait photographers; Instagram for lifestyle image makers who use the medium to promote their personal brands. So where do amateur photographers find a home? Increasingly on Google+, where user-generated groups and "hang outs" allow amateurs to both share their works and discover others that share their interests. One such photographer is Ivan Makarov, a photography enthusiast and the Controller of the online image-sharing site SmugMug. Until two years ago, Russian-born Makarov was working as a tax consultant in Silicon Valley. Today, along with running the financial side of SmugMug—and taking many of the images on their website—he is also the editor of the Plus One Collection, a photography book of images culled from users on Google+.
Although he’s never worked as a photographer in a professional capacity, Makarov has been passionate about the medium ever since he first picked up his first digital SLR, a Nikon D40, while in college. Later, in graduate school at Brigham Young University, “I was living in a big city, so going out and taking landscape shots really re-energized me,” he explained. In the early days of the Internet, he shared these shots on sites like Flickr. In 2011, when Google+ launched, he and many of the photographers he had met on other online social networks signed up for the platform. “At the time, photographs just didn’t look very good on Facebook,” he said of his decision to use Google+ rather than another site. “Google+ did a really good job presenting images in the layout, and it was really easy to use considering that many of us were already connected via our Gmail accounts.”
I love reading about unexpected happenings. And in this case with Ivan Makarov who has become the editor of Plus One Collection, a photography book of images that are pulled together from Google+ users. Reading this article is really about witnessing photographers grouping together to create a good thing.