u/ZachVSCO

In celebration of world photography day, tell us how you got started in photography!

I’ll go first: I got a Vivitar 5500PZ for Christmas in 5th grade from my grandparents. A film P&S with a 38-70 zoom back in the 90’s that went on all family vacations with me. I later found one on eBay and re-bought it just for the memory, and it’s sitting on my desk right now.

But the other part of my story is a family friend, Don Corning, who was a commercial photographer in the town I grew up in. He had a studio, a dark room, cameras, lights, and SO much enthusiasm for photography. He went digital really early with a 12mp Leaf back for his Hasselblad (not sure why I remember that detail), and when I was 12, he gave me a stack of floppy disks to get Photoshop 3.0 onto the family computer, which instantly hooked me.

In my early 20’s, photography really latched on with my friends and room mates (one was Greg Lutze, cofounder of VSCO!) who were deeper into it than me, but I didn’t realize until later that I had so much to draw from because of Don. When it came time to make VSCO Presets, I didn’t even know I was really technical and deep into editing because it had always just been normal to me to do that stuff from him.

He passed away before VSCO really took off, and I’ve often wished I could show him everything his influence in me led to, but I’m so grateful for such an amazing foundation in photography.

What about you, what’s your story?

PS:

Also, we've got a beautiful blog up for WPD featuring TONS of amazing work from the community.

Also also, don't forget to submit your work to the 50 open call to get your work on a billboard in your state!

Hi everyone, I want to call out a pretty significant update to VSCO Sites that went live recently with the integration of VSCO Galleries into Sites. All users, from the free Starter tier and up, can now use the free VSCO Galleries iOS App or VSCO Galleries for MacOS  and connect their Galleries directly to their VSCO Site.

Here’s how: build your galleries in the Galleries app, be sure they’re set to be public, select “Add Galleries” from the sites builder, and select the galleries you want to add.

• Title and cover images you set in the Galleries app will carry over to the Site.
• Changes you make to the galleries in the app will automatically reflect on your site.

Also, if you weren’t aware, Sites has gotten some other meaningful upgrades since launch:

• Custom domain support (Pro + One)
• Contact form with VSCO Workspace integration
• Add VSCO post or upload images directly to Selects

Personally, these updates were the changes I needed to finally move my personal website over. I did it last week and it was super easy! Not trying to advertise my photography at all, but you can see what a VSCO Site with Galleries looks like here: zachhodges.com

I think it’d be really cool to see people’s sites here, so if you make one please share it! And let us know how it goes for you too, there’s always room for improvement and we’ve got more in store for Sites.

Hi everyone, we’re doing something pretty cool that I think many of you would want to be a part of.

It's called The Fifty. We're selecting fifty photographers, one from every state, to have their work on billboards across the country. The idea is pretty simple: photographers are building careers in every corner of the country, and you can make it right where you are. 

We believe this to our core, and we want to celebrate photographers in a tangible, massive way, with billboards right where they are.

How to submit: post 3 to 5 images to VSCO with #TheFifty plus your state tag, so #TheFiftyOH if you're in Ohio. Add a short caption about the image or series, and put your state in your bio. Free to submit, open to photographers 18+ living in the US.

Our curation team will review submissions, make editorial selections, and notify selected photographers on a rolling basis. If your work is selected, we license it and you're paid for it. You'll also be asked for a high-res file suitable for large-format printing and any associated approvals as needed.

For more details, see the full blog post

u/superamazingphotos this is your moment haha. A lot of you have posted great work here and on VSCO, so let's get some of it up on a billboard!

Hi folks,

We’ve been hard at work on the product and I wanted to highlight some updates that came this month that bring some nice upgrades to the experience:

Galleries, now on desktop

Galleries is no longer mobile-only! You can also now:

• Turn off downloads on a per-Gallery basis — useful if you're sharing selects with a client before a licensing agreement is signed and you don't want full-res files walking out the door yet
• Add video to a Gallery, not just stills

Studio Pro 1.1

This update is entirely about speed . Fewer clicks between you and the photo actually being done.

• No more 25-photo cap on Gallery publishing. Send a full batch to a client Gallery in one go, however big it is. This was the most requested fix and it's gone now.
• Preset filtering and organizing in the editor. If your preset list has turned into scroll-forever chaos, you can now actually sort it.
• Swipe between presets while editing. Try looks faster and stay in the flow.
• Autosave status indicator. You'll see confirmation your work is saving as you go, instead of just hoping that’s what’s happening.
• GPU-accelerated HSL. Color adjustments respond faster, especially noticeable on bigger batches.

Workspace

Quick heads up: Workspace now has a free version! It's a modern rebuild, no trial, no credit card. If you've only known the paid version, worth a look. A few updates for it this month:

• Jobs can be reassigned to the right client, with a warning if a contract's already signed
• Cleaner sidebar and faster navigation

Invoicing and Contracts are coming soon, plus fixes to email, time zones, and contact name display.

VSCO App

Mostly stability work this round, but several fixes worth calling out:

• RAW and HDR editing is a lot more stable, so fewer crashes on heavy edits, and live preview now updates while you're zoomed in instead of freezing until you let go.
• The preset dock in SDR mode used to take minutes to load... now it's fast.
• Videos now export in the format you actually picked (HDR or SDR), instead of ignoring the toggle.
• RAW photos with Borders applied now export, share, and preview correctly. This was broken before.
• Posts that failed no longer get stuck retrying forever.
• Studio and AI Lab drafts no longer show up blank while cloud sync catches up.

Also fixed some Collage bugs (layers disappearing, wrong crop position after reopening) and several crashes around editing and undo.

VSCO Capture

Mostly stability this month, plus a couple of small annoyances cleared up:

• Deleting photos no longer leaves gaps in your gallery.
• Exposure control won't get stuck looking disabled when it's actually usable.

Also smoothed out some flicker in grain editing, plus login and camera stability fixes under the hood.

That’s it for July. Let us know what breaks, what you love, and what's still missing!

If you’ve been here for any length of time you have probably seen the gorgeous photos of u/superamazingphotos , and we met today in Brooklyn at Photoville! Definitely check his work if you haven’t seen it, and come say hi at Photoville if you’re in the city, it’s a really special photography experience unlike anything I’ve been to myself.

Thanks to Shay and everyone else here and on VSCO that make this photography community so special.