Photo-sharing platforms such as Flickr and Pinterest are commonly not enjoying serious acclaim amongst professionals. A few months ago, a user expressed his opinion in a discussion on the hottest photo communities for professional photographers: “if you want to be taken seriously by your customers, by no means Flickr!”. Immediately afterwards, the thread was flooded with “+1”, “Ack!” and the like. A good example that Flickr may very well be used as a career stepping stone is Rosie Hardy.
The 21-year old photographer began taking her first photos at the age of 16, for reasons any teenager of today can easily relate to: she merely wanted to have a nice snapshot for her MySpace-profile, to impress the boy she was in love with. What started out so trivially, developed into a fully fledged love for photography. She deliberated a concept and selected a venue for each photo, and with every experiment her portraits got better.
She accomplished her breakthrough, when the world-famous band Maroon 5 was looking for a cover-photo for the new album „Hands all over“. The management team googled the term “hands all over” and came up with the following photo of Hardy. The concept was promising, but according to management, it lacked “sexappeal”. Hardy thus immediately took several self-portraits on the bed, merged them (hands) and sent the photo back. The management liked the result so much that they chose this feasibility-proof, where no professional model was involved, for the cover.
The rest is history, as the saying goes. 🙂
