Staying up to date with your favorite photographers can be quite time consuming, but I'll just quickly go over some pro tips that lets follow the artists you like and find new talent and inspiration from great sources.
Following Photography Blogs: Feedly, Bloglovin and Feedreaders
When following photographers you probably don't want to visit their website every day if they don't publish a new thing every day, but you still want to read their blog. Luckily there are services like feedly and bloglovin that allow you to subscribe to their websites and to have an interface that easily allows you to only read the posts you haven't read yet.
bloglovin is more common in the rest of the blog-sphere, but they have their own category for photography, which is worth having a look at. Also you can follow any blog with it, not only the ones that have been added by the blog owners.
We use feed readers, especially feedly a lot, because it's just so much better than having to scan a website visually for what you've read or seen already!
Feel free to follow either or both:
Instead of using a web service with bundled apps that sync to your phone you can also use a self hosted or standalone feedreader application. There's a bunch of great ones for Windows, Mac and Linux, just google "best feedreader for (insert your operating system here)".
Art and Photography Sites
To find new and amazing photographers to follow or to just have a look at the most popular works of the last month, year or since the respective community has been started.
deviantArt for example is probably the largest online art community, spanning all skill levels and most categories of visual art from cosplay, painting, animation and of course a ton of great photography!
flickr is very photography focused and many of its fans are fearing for it's future since Yahoo's situation as a company is still unstable. In the meantime, flickr has amassed a huge amount of great photographers that post their images and especially the geo tagging feature also helps you find locations for your next shoot in an area. Also worth mentioning is the massive amount of creative commons licensed pictures on flickr that are free to use as stock or other material.
500px again is exclusive to photography and many great shots! Imagine it as the vimeo of photography sites, providing features to paying subscribers such as portfolios or selling prints in a built-in shop.
The user base may not be as big, but the relative amount of absolutely great photos you can have a look at there is really hard to find other places on the web.
Unsplash is a site where photographers have to give up any license of their pictures to have them featured. Still many do, in order to receive the promotion to the immense audience the blog has gathered since it was started.
Every 10 days, 10 photos are published and the quality is usually amazing. Many of the photos are landscapes and some of them are a not very unique, because their primary purpose seems to be mood stock photos.
Social Media: Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat
Social networks have shifted a lot of their focus to visual content like images and videos, which is why you're in luck if you're into photography. With facebook it's always a gamble if you get to see what you want to stay up to date with when it comes to pages you follow.
A trick you can apply to pages is that you can flag them as a priority by stating that you want to see their content first.
Shameless self promotion, you can of course follow and prioritize GegenWind on facebook ;)
Most natural to a lot of photographers of course is Instagram, since it's basically a visual-only community. Since it has received the story feature, it's also become a lot more like Snapchat and supports short videos that are available for 24 hours.
Instagram is great both for inspiration and for keeping a network. A lot of photographers we follow also take the time and effort to upload their DSLR shots and not only what they shot on their phones. (We also are big fans of the Canon 6D feature to transmit images to our phones via Wi-Fi on the go)
We're basically keeping a small second portfolio for GegenWind on instagram because it's super easy and discoverable.
Where do you Follow Photographers?
Where do you follow your favourite photographers? Any of the mentioned networks or elsewhere? Drop us a comment or message on GegenWind on facebook and let us know! We'll be sure to add them to the post!