The second assignment for this week reads: "A photo of some sort of sport or leisure activity, this may or may not be sport in progress, it could be players relaxing etc."

Since I am even less interested in sport than I am in boats - in fact, I'm spectacularly DISinterested in sports! (but don't tell that to the rest of Australia or I'll certainly be deported!) - this is an even more arduous task. So here I need some ideas as well as C&C on the images below, please! At the weekend when I have a model to fit the shoes, I might experiment with a multiple-exposure shot of a "ghost" runner in the National Park... d'you think it might work?

Please comment as brutally as you like - I would far rather get it on the chin from you guys than have the Canon- and Nikon-users sticking their noses in the air next Monday evening!!! Help, help, the reputation of Pentax in the entire South Sydney region depends on YOU!

Luckily my husband runs for "fun," (yes, some people do that, you know) so I made use of his oldest and tattiest running shoes as follows:

Shoes 1 Shoes 2


Shoes 3 Shoes 4


Shoes 5

Thanks in advance for your input!

[Mandi]

Ok, here are a few thoughts on the shoes.

I have taken a conscious decision to "drop out" of too much active participation in this forum(which is not to say I won't still come and read and look and learn) after the last few days when so much I said has been misunderstood - not helped, I freely admit, by my letting off steam so tediously a couple of nights ago when the site was down. But I don't want to "drop out" without taking the time to thank you, ChrisA, very much for your most recent post, and also the one which prompted the "steam-venting." The steam-venting was certainly unneccesary (I was just so SICK and TIRED of people completely misinterpreting everything I wrote) but the exercise of evaluating my own work was useful and even quite enjoyable - which is, I'm sure, the reason you originally suggested it. I intend doing this kind of exercise (but in private, not public!! ) in future.

Your comments above are extremely interesting reading, (and good to know they have been useful for others as well as me) and I thank you very much for taking the time to look and think so deeply and to post them. Your points, I think, are all very valid and certainly give me huge scope for improving even on this very ordinary idea. I have moved on a little with regard to this particular assignment, having spent the afternoon in the National Park photographing my husband bushwalking, but intend to come back and re-visit the whole shoe idea at some later stage - I think with some of your ideas they could be turned into good images.

I have been very touched to receive pm's from other members of the forum clearly not impressed with some of the things that have been said - or perhaps more the way that they've been said - in this and my other recent thread. Thank you to those people and also to the people like ChrisA who took the trouble to comment on the images (instead of on me!) All your input is deeply appreciated and I will mull over everything useful that has been said and do my best to just ignore all the other c**p!!

But I was starting to spend too much time here, and to think that this forum was the fount of all knowledge. What ChrisA has done for me is make me realise that what's important is what we and the people we care about think of our images, not what other people who know nothing about us and have their own agendas might have to say about them (or us!) I will put more effort into finding some mentors that I trust rather than just hoping wisdom might "average" out of a collection of random people!! (And again, I deeply appreciate the private offers of critique, which I will certainly avail myself of!)