500px Smashes Photographer with Ban Hammer for Pics Not Being “Photographic”

One man’s photograph is not 500px’s it would seem.

A photographer finds himself banned from 500px after the photo service told him his collection wasn’t photographic enough.

According to PetaPixel, Tim Gamble is a Manchester, UK-based light artist who does all of his work entirely with a camera.

But apparently it doesn’t look like it enough for 500px which deleted his account for “posting non-photographic content.”

As anyone would do, Tim reached out to 500px to ask about his account deletion and they looked into it – but didn’t reinstate his account.

Their letter to Tim reads in part: “[I]t looks like it was reported for posting non-photographic content. Illustrations and graphic designs are not accepted at this time…so we will not be reinstating your account.

Tim’s work is shared online as Fade to Black Light Art and he is quite well known within the community. He is even an ambassador for Light Painting Brushes.

Per PetaPixel, Gamble said of his work: “I’d say 99% of my work is created in-camera during a single long exposure with some Lightroom edits to the raw file. Sometimes I like to create double exposures in Photoshop for some of my 365 project shots, but they are described as such and are few and far between and I wouldn’t classify them as graphic design or an illustration.”

Gamble points out that he uploads his original photos to 500px complete with original EXIF info which should give the service more than enough evidence that he doesn’t doctor his photos. All in all he seems to be taking it in stride.

“It feels like quite a compliment and I’m not angry…It’s unsurprising that to the untrained eye they appear to be created in a non-photographic manner although you would have thought that on a platform such as theirs someone would have the first idea as to what light painting is.”

You can check his work out here on Instagram.

He also posts to Facebook and Flickr as well.