[khardur]

I found out it's very hard to take a landscape on a winter morning with the 10-17 fisheye without getting a bit of shadow in the picture... LOL

actually just Monday I was at the library looking at some books of photography, and I saw an Ansel Adams self portrait where he had basically from the torso up of his shadow in the frame of an photo, so it's not like it's totally unheard of.

To me it was ugly, but there are definitely some artistic ways to have the shadow in there, as SpecialK has shown us above.

[rfortson]

Depends on the shot. If it's a family snapshot, then I don't worry about it too much as I'm just documenting a moment (plus, see my story below the pictures). If the shadow is not supposed to be part of the shot, then I definitely don't want it creeping into the shot. Finally, sometimes it's fun to be a part of the shot.





I have another shot, but it's not online so I can't post it. It's my little girl when she was 3 years old, running around at Mount Rushmore. She's running away (playing) since I'm trying to get her to pose in front of the carving for the typical tourist shot. She was having none of it. However, I noticed that as she ran away toward the visitor's center, the monument was reflected nicely in the large windows, along with me taking the shot. It's one of my favorite vacation shots. I took it with a Canon S400 (a great little P&S).

[StarDust]

You can upload pictures onto the forum by pressing post reply and pressing the paper clip and then upload the picture. Links are not necessary.
I'm a new user and found this out just now by myself so you might already know this and have your upload limit full or something.
Feels weird to give tips as I'm a newbie here but I hope it helps.

[Buddha Jones]

I think it add a personal touch indeed, as well as an artistick one, but I think it should always be intentional as to not make it a distraction from the scene you are trying to capture. It's like taking a picture with a long lens and using the on camera flash, the shadow you get from the lens doesn't add anything to the picture, more often than not it ruins it.

Its something that I have often wanted to do, hang the camera frommy neck and put it on the self timers and just let it shoot while my hands were doing something other than hold the camera.

[christinelandon]

Including the photographer's shadow in a photo has a long history and some notable practitioners. If done for a good photographic reason, I don't see it as objectionable; though I try to shoot few of these sorts of shots myself. One good reason to include a shadow: the subject needs a sense of scale, and there aren't other people or objects at hand to include in the shot.