Countless pro photographers are using social networking sites to promote themselves, and probably just as many are skeptical of the whole notion. Can online networking really pay off, or is it a waste of time?

An elite few photographers have managed not just to establish themselves online, but to become sensationally popular. They're experts in how to leverage the community connections that come from social networking.

For our highly subjective list of the five biggest photographers on the Internet, PDN focused on the ones who dominate each of five popular platforms: blogging, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. For this exercise, we considered only photographers who are primarily known for their online work. We also avoided those who are best known for writing gear reviews.

Our list includes a photojournalist-turned-educator, a fine artist, an editorial photographer, a wedding shooter and a multimedia journalist. We spoke to each one about how they climbed these virtual mountains, and what see from the top.
 
It’s clear that success online doesn’t always translate into jobs. A hit YouTube video won’t make your phone ring, and a Twitter stream alone generates no revenue. There are downsides: Comments from Flickr users can be obnoxious.

However, all of these photographers credit the Internet with leading to some work, and in at least one case, financial success. And it’s hard to overstate the personal satisfaction of having a legion of online fans.

Our stories begin on the next page.

Who did we overlook? E-mail dlang@pdnonline.com.
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David Hobby Editor of Strobist Age: 44 Location: Columbia, Maryland Vital statistic: 70,000 to 80,000 daily impressions on his blog

Launched in 2006, David Hobby’s how-to blog Strobist was perfectly positioned to ride the wave of interest in advanced amateur photography.

Hobby started blogging about camera lighting when he was a staff photographer at The Baltimore Sun. As more amateurs began tinkering with digital SLRs, Strobist grew so popular that Hobby decided to take a sabbatical to work on the blog. Eventually he decided blogging was a safer career bet than newspaper photography. Today, Strobist is a full-time job.

“I’m writing something that I would have stayed up all night to read 20 years ago,” Hobby says. His blog instructs photographers on ways to make the most of relatively inexpensive, off-camera flashes.

Strobist is useful, free and insanely popular. Hobby figures he has 350,000 regular readers. His tone is friendly and the site welcomes beginners with pages of basic lighting tips. It also includes frequent updates with advice, pictures, gear reviews, and links to photographers who are trying interesting things with lights. It encourages reader feedback and experimentation.

Hobby still shoots some assignments, but his main focus is on the blog. His steadiest source of revenue is advertising, but he also sells a set of DVDs (now in their sixth printing) and occasionally gives lectures.

“It has radically changed my career,” Hobby says. “The blog has become its own business. It can easily support a family of four.”

Enough people approach him to advertise on the site that he never has to make sales calls; his ad inventory is sold out with a long waiting list.

Hobby’s blog has a rabid following on Flickr, and Hobby has recently re-started a Twitter feed that is driving some visitors to the site. The next direction for the site, he says, will be to encourage his enthusiastic readers to use photography to help their communities.

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir Fine art photographer Age: 31 Location: Hafnarfjörður, Iceland. Vital statistic: 6 million Flickr photostream views

There’s no way to be sure who are the most popular photographers on Flickr, but few have achieved the popularity of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir.

Guðleifsdóttir, a recent graduate of the Iceland Academy of the Arts, helped launch a surrealism craze on Flickr. Her dream-like digital images have won thousands of adoring fans. One of Rebekka’s most popular pictures, a portrait of herself with an apple frozen in mid-air, has been viewed over 122,000 times.

Guðleifsdóttir started posting her work on Flickr in 2005, when the service was fairly new. Before long, dozens of positive comments like “Excellent!” and “Beautiful!” began appearing beneath her images.

“The more feedback I got, the more care I started putting into the kind of photos I was taking,” she says. “I put some pressure on myself to really up the standard of what I was doing.”

Many of her photographs are self-portraits, and some of her sexier poses drew a lot of attention. “I could have gone much further in that direction,” she says, but wanted to keep it tasteful.

Guðleifsdóttir’s Flickr presence has led to a few assignments, including an advertising shoot for Toyota, but not many. She sells prints to her fans through an online shop, which yields a sale or two a month. It's “pocket money,” she says.

In 2008, a New York Times Magazine writer cited Guðleifsdóttir as an example of the emerging Flickr style: highly manipulated “digital images that ‘pop’ with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.” (Guðleifsdóttir, on her blog, complained about the Times’ failure to include the diacritic over the third letter in her last name: “Misspelling my last name, however, was only one of several things that pissed me off about that article.”)

Last year Guðleifsdóttir began posting fewer images to Flickr.

“I started getting some really bitchy comments,” she says. When she would post experimental work, people would accuse her of slipping, or of letting them down. She describes it as “weird expectations from anonymous people... It took the fun out of it, basically.”

She’s now trying to make a career as a fine artist, working with a gallery called The Nevica Project.

“I’m studying to be an artist. It’s a career. It’s not a hobby. I’m not doing it for the hell of it,” she says.

Noah Kalina Fine art and editorial photographer Age: 28 Location: Brooklyn, New York Vital statistic: 12,900,000 YouTube video plays

You know Noah Kalina. If you don’t, it’s because you missed his “everyday” video, which he published in August 2006 as the viral video craze was taking off on YouTube.

The clip, called “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years,” has been watched millions of times on YouTube. It has been imitated and satirized countless times, even on “The Simpsons.”

Kalina started the project, of course, before YouTube existed, and worked on it as a student at the School of Visual Arts. Today Kalina shoots still photography professionally; his work has appeared in magazines such as New York and Interview.

Yet despite years of popularity, the YouTube video hasn’t been great for assignments. “It obviously gave me name recognition and Internet fame,” Kalina says. But it never led directly to work.

However, Kalina has fared well by promoting his photography on his Flickr account. “Flickr has probably gotten me more work than my regular Web site has,” Kalina says.

Kalina has learned a few lessons on how to make the most of Flickr. He discovered he was happier with the comments disabled (“I found the comments would be distracting”) and noticed that his work featuring female nudity always got a lot of views.

“I’m certainly guilty of pandering,” he says. “You sort of realize what people will go for, which is boobs and girls.”

He may be underselling himself. Kalina’s pictures, boobs or otherwise, are imaginative and unique.

His Flickr pictures routinely get thousands of views. Some editors have found him through Flickr and given him assignments, including a shoot for I.D. magazine. “Younger art directors are scouring that site looking for good work,” Kalina says.

Christopher Becker Wedding photographer Age: 35 Location: Mission Viejo, California Vital statistic: 5,000 Facebook friends

When he started his business 11 years ago, Christopher Becker decided to brand himself as a wedding photographer with one name: The Becker.

Smart move. The “Becker” brand looked great in promotional materials, and ultimately worked well as an online identity.

Becker started his blog in 2005 as a way to keep in touch with his family, and he makes several posts a week about whatever’s going on in his life. Gradually, the blog has attracted a following, getting about 5,000 readers a day.

Explaining the site’s popularity, he says, “I think people are just voyeurs and want to see what other people are doing.”

Last year, Becker joined Facebook and discovered some new ways to drum up work.

After he shoots a wedding, he posts select images on Facebook, tagging them with the name of the bride. Invariably, friends of the bride label the rest of the people in the pictures, who are notified that they’ve been tagged. If those friends are ever looking for a wedding photographer in the future, they have a direct line to The Becker.

Recently, Becker maxed out his Facebook account with 5,000 friends, the limit the site allows. He keeps an eye on people’s status updates. “I love seeing the Facebook tag, ‘so-and-so is engaged,’” he says.

In the last six months, “I’ve booked three specific weddings that I can attribute directly to Facebook,” Becker says. That’s about $35,000 worth of business.

Outside of Facebook, the virtual relationships he’s built through his blog have also helped his wedding business. “It’s hard to track exactly how much money it’s brought in,” he says, but he observes that potential clients feel at ease if they already know him through his blog.

In October, Becker launched an online wedding photography site called [b] school, aimed at pro photographers. It’s a custom-built social networking site with video lessons and other advice. Wedding photographers also use it to refer jobs to friends if someone approaches them to shoot an event and they’re already booked.

It’s still early for [b] school, but the site looks like it will be a success. About 1,600 photographers are paying $10 a month to be part of it.

Jim MacMillan Multimedia journalist Age: 48 Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Vital statistic: 46,000 Twitter followers

Since taking a buyout from the Philadelphia Daily News last September, photographer Jim MacMillan has become the Twitter king of Philadelphia news.

Under the name @jimmacmillan, he posts breaking headlines, media news, and links to quirky stories. To keep track of the news, MacMillan uses a variety of Twitter tools to monitor what people are talking about, and follows several other breaking news streams.

He writes with the authoritative voice of a professional journalist, favoring the important and the interesting. One Tweet might be about a live Obama press conference, the next might be a link to an odd story such as “Bomb squad detonates pickled mangoes.”

This edited potpourri has won him a whopping 46,000 followers on Twitter and counting. Growth has come in waves, usually following media coverage of his work. To the best of our knowledge, MacMillan is the most popular photographer on Twitter.

So where does photography come into this? After 17 years as a Daily News photographer, MacMillan is now trying to establish himself as an independent multimedia journalist. “You don’t just stop being a journalist,” he says.

He devotes about 1/3 of his Tweets to promoting his own blog or other personal activities. “My online revenue is still lunch money,” he says. “But the self-promotional factors have been rewarding.”

With the popularity of his blog on the rise, he hopes to approach sponsors. Eventually, he wants to get back to working on photo essays, like the multimedia projects he used to produce for the Daily News.

Using technology, he’s trying to replicate the things he loved about being a newspaper photographer, minus the newspaper. He lists the three basic elements of the job: 1. Work with integrity. 2. An audience. 3. Revenue.

So far so good with the first two.