Sorry, that was really weird - I couldn't get onto the forum yesterday evening for some reason - was it down? Or just my connection from here? No problem with other websites....
I also had to go back and remove a lot of smilies because of the limit on 15... please read with understanding!!!
Here's what I wrote just before it went down:
It's a "fair cop", Chris. But first:
These two threads have opened up such a huge can of worms that I am really very uncomfortable about having ever started them. I'm going to say it again - this is was never intended to be a way of getting other people to do my photography, my PP, or anything else for me. Nor was it intended (initially) as a moan or a rant about the course I'm on, and OF COURSE I know all that stuff about moving out of one's comfort zone etc etc - I am a school teacher myself, and I probably say all that stuff to my own students a dozen times a week! :) The only reason I mentioned my disappointment with the course in my most recent post was because some replies seemed to indicate that if I only went along to the course with a properly open mind, I'd get all sorts of valuable things out of it. Now if you think for a moment: WHY would I have signed up for a course if I knew in advance it was going to be at a much simpler technical and creative level than I was expecting??? And if I intended from the start to "subvert" the course and get nothing out of it, wouldn't it have been easier to save my $300 and stay home on Monday nights?
The fact of the matter is that I don't have access to some of the great courses being offered at the place 35mmfilm_user teaches at (on the other thread) and this is the first and only "advanced" course that my local adult ed college is offering this year - the others are all "introduction to digital photgraphy" and the like. So I was HOPING to be challenged and pushed, I was HOPING to learn how to see more creatively, and as a side-issue, I was expecting to be taught some useful technical skills both in using the camera and in PP. The only pre-requisites for doing the course were that one had a digital SLR and was "competent in its use" - which I took to mean, I had to know where the buttons were and what they did, which I suppose I do. However, to my surprise and disappointment (and I suppose I thought people on this forum would "get" that from the simple act of putting the word "advanced" in quotes in my very first post) I discovered that the course was NOT what I was expecting - and I said very clearly, perhaps next week will be better, so I didn't want anyone to think I was passing judgement on the whole course OR the tutor by my comments. If I knew for a fact that the tutor was reading this forum, I would say the same thing, and I would say the same thing to his face if he asked me. I don't think it necessary to go out of my way to say it if he doesn't ask because the fact of the matter is that the other fifteen course participants are probably in the right course for their skill levels, judging by their responses and questions. (Again, don't shoot me down, I could be wrong. I haven't seen any of their work, I've just seen them handling their cameras and heard them asking questions! They could all turn out to be creative genuises.) I had expected to go along and be challenged by other students doing way interesting and difficult and unusual and creative things, (the sort of thing that a lot of members of this forum do!) and instead I found myself showing other students where to find the little button to press so their lens can come off, and where to turn focus to "manual" and agreeing that I would help next week, when we are to do some "simple Photoshop work" because I was the only student who had EVER used an image processing program of any description and the tutor himself said that he doesn't know very much, generally his wife does all the Photoshop stuff in their house. But because the overall course project is to make a calendar (hence two images a week for six weeks) we need to have enough Photoshop skills to be able to drop our photos into a template of a calendar page - and for that, the tutor needs to ask my help.
Let me say this again before someone misconstrues what I just said: I EXPECTED to find myself amongst people who would challenge and stretch me, and instead I found my very meagre technical skills to be amongst the best in the room (obviously excluding the tutor, who appears very competent if, as I said, not all that creative IN WHAT I HAVE SEEN OF WHAT HE PUBLISHES on his website - maybe he is going to give me some terrific feedback on how to make my work more interesting and edgy). It's not my fault that this happened, and nor do I think for a moment that it's the fault of the tutor or the other students. They are also doing the "right thing" by going along to an evening course and improving their skills. The "fault," if there is one, is perhaps only with the editor of the college's prospectus, who didn't make it sufficiently clear that "advanced" meant "has used a camera, knows nothing about dSLR."
So there I am, in that situation, and I find the tutor and the other students are, as I said right at the top of this or the other thread, METAPHORICALLY looking down their collective noses because here I am with a camera that many of them have never heard of. OF COURSE there wasn't some chorus of "what rubbish is that?" but the fact of the matter is that these are all new dSLR users, they've probably all been told (as I have) by pushy camera salesmen that "there are only two manufacturers." The only two students that I spoke more than a couple of words to, one asked "do they still make Pentax cameras?" and the other, looking at my K10D, asked if it was a "real" SLR. I felt sorry that they were going to be judging Pentax by MY work, which I don't feel confident of. I would like them to go away from this course, along with all the other far more important things which they no doubt will learn, not thinking "gosh, I wish I'd bought a Pentax!" but simply aware that there are other manufacturers and they make good equipment too. I don't think my reaction was so much competitiveness, just a feeling that I'd been sort of left-footed by the whole evening, and I was determined to get something out of it.
Now I think I need to clear something else up. This is adult ed, which is Australia means low key, very much "do as much as you want to" sort of stuff. I will not "pass" or "fail" the course, I will not get a "grade" or a mark for the homework or the course as a whole. If I attend 75% or more of the classes (and sleep in the corner, if I wish to) I can ask for, and be given a "Certificate of Attendance." Maybe I should explain, because some people seem to have the idea that I am eliciting support in order to acquire by devious means a large elaborate gold certificate and fifteen letters after my name: a "college" in Australia isn't like a "college" in America, which I think we'd call a "University." A "college" is any place where you go to learn something. Even my 11- and 12-year-olds go to "college." Maybe that misunderstanding is why some people are getting so worked up about this?
The homework was exactly as quoted above. Unfortunately I wasn't able to ask the tutor specific questions or more detail as the college hadn't run off the notes in time for the first session, and he had to email them, with the homework, the next day. However, I have absolutely no expectation that I am going to "fail" because I didn't show a real boat and/or a real runner. I can guarantee (if it's anything like my other evening class, Italian, at the same college) that at least four or five people will turn up without any homework at all, and an equal number will turn up with a couple of old holiday snaps or whatever - not because they are lazy or disinterested, but because we are generally busy people and they won't have had time to shoot specifically for the class for one reason or another. (PS - that doesn't make THEM bad people either, before anyone starts ranting about it!) I therefore regard the assigned topics more as suggestions than as commandments. This is not me being high-handed or whatever, it's just the way these things work here. We are a very egalitarian society, and no-one "tells" anyone else to do anything, least of all a tutor at an adult ed college!
My moaning and whingeing about disliking the topics was REALLY not intended to be taken seriously! Actually, they are both excellent topics for someone to assign in Sydney because Australians are, as a nation, sports fanatics and almost every person in that room (except me) probably will have a regular Saturday morning game of soccer, netball or tennis, and so taking their camera along and getting a couple of shots of their friends playing will be easy. It's not as easy for me (from a logistical point-of-view) because I am not a sporty person, I don't have sporty friends or family and anyone unknown to the club hanging around a sports ground, especially with a big serious-looking camera and ESPECIALLY while kids are playing, becomes very suspect as a potential paedophile. When I said that as a teacher I couldn't risk it, I wasn't really joking there. Even if I want to take pictures of kids in my own classroom, using Maths equipment that I've developed, I have to ask written permission of their parents first. I certainly couldn't take pictures of other peoples' kids to something like an evening class, nor could I post them somewhere like this without genuinely risking my job.
The other topic is also a very good one for Sydneysiders as many people here are fanatical "boaties" and again, will probably be going down to their marina to sail their "tinnie" sometime on the weekend. Again, it happens to be something I and my family don't do, so once again, it's not a subject which is easy for me from the logistical point of view. Yes, I could of course make time to go down to a marina myself, and I might yet do so. Does "getting off my butt" to go down to the marina count as "pushing myself?" I don't think so - I think I should be putting my effort into "pushing myself" with the actual photos I take, wherever I do it.
It so happened that yesterday I was home from work with a very sick daughter (right in the middle of her Final exams, poor thing!) and so I found myself with time on my hands to start playing with some ideas. I couldn't go out to a marina, but I did have lovely reflective water in the little pond in my garden. I didn't have anyone taking part in a sport, just a sad and sweaty teenager trying to study Modern History on a couch, but I did have the only sporting equipment in the house, my husband's old shoes. And I could start playing with those while being around for my daughter.
Soooo... Chris (this is the loooongest reply to a short question, I'm really sorry, but there's a lot of undercurrent in this thread which is making me quite uncomfortable and I suppose I feel the need to justify and explain) perhaps the first thing I should say about my own photos, that has been picked up on by a couple of other posters, is that they are not really "about" anything and of course that makes them weaker than photos which one makes because one is passionate about the subject matter. They are "about" having an assignment which I want to start working on, some Photoshop skills learned in a vacation on-line course that I want to practise, and some vague ideas of something that might work out if I experiment.
In the "something floating on water" pictures I was simply trying to get some pleasing shapes, with nice clear reflections to show they were on water. I liked the leaf for its simplicity of form and the way that Pentax produces that really RED red, and the violet because it was a much more complex shape and the way its reflections often didn't look at all like the part of the real flower you could see from the front. I tried other leaves, including yellow ones, and a lorikeet feather, none of which were successful.
Because I THINK (as I said, I haven't really been able to clarify it - I suppose I could email the tutor but again, that's not really something we do here in Australia) the assignment is really "about" practising manual focus, that was the technical skill I was trying to concentrate on. Because the day was very overcast and the pond is tucked deep under a tree on the shady side of the house, I had very little light available and I got a lot of camera or subject blur on many of the shots. I tried shooting on a tripod but my tripod is very elderly and shaky, (yes, don't tell me, maybe I should have used the $300 on a new tripod rather than a photography course!!) and I was actually better off shooting hand-held using SR and a faster ISO. So the reason I chose these particular shots for my "short list" was that they were all, IMO, in focus (although someone has already pointed out that one, at least, could use some sharpening - I had missed that, and that kind person, whoever it was (sorry to have forgotten your name) has done me a huge favour because those few words made me look even more critically at the focus.
The final cull on the "focus okay" list was on composition. I find it hard to quanitfy composition, but I "just liked" them all. I'm not a great believer in The Rule of Thirds but because I knew these pictures were going to be looked at critically by others, I did try to keep that in mind - does it follow the Rule of Thirds? If not, do I have a valid reason why not? You may notice that they are by no means all in the standard 4:3 (or whatever?) format - again, I don't believe (necessarily) in Golden Rectangles and things and crop to all sorts of shapes and ratios.
The specific questions you asked are hard to answer because I really was trying all sorts of variables. I experimented with camera angles from very close to the water and from almost directly above, and in the end decided that I was getting closest to the reflections I wanted by sticking to a sort of midway position (say an angle of about 40 deg to the water) because that cut out any background "stuff" (which, yes, according to the homework assignment I probably should have kept in) but still retained the reflections.
I experimented a lot with DOF too. despite the fact that this has not yet been mentioned in the course - with the water ones I tried to keep it shallow enough to throw the lily leaves out but still keep most of the subject in. With the flower I felt I needed to get the little yellow "eye" in focus because otherwise the whole image became uncomfortably "loose" if you know what I mean. In the ones in which it is visible, I think I generally succeeded, most of all in No 6. However, I think the version of that which I posted is actually a little too sharpened in the front white petals, where there's almost a sort of glitter, and I have subsequently softened them a little - not the rest of the image, just the white part of the two front petals.
With the leaves I concentrated most on the edge of the leaf as I really like that sinuous line. No 1 I think I missed it, either accidentally or deliberately, as the central vein is in focus and both edges are too soft, but I kept that one on my short list as I liked the shape of the leaf from that angle (the leaves and things were blowing around the pond and so I had to take what I could get sometimes!) I also, in nos 3 - 5, tried for a deeper DOF. In #3, the leaf's okay but I don't like the lily leaves quite so sharp (should I blur them? maybe); in the other two I just didn't quite nail it - it could have been poor focusing but it also could have been a bit of subject or camera blur - as I said, I didn't have a heap of available light. (Can one tell which it is?)
Shutter speed was not something I tried to control. I was in Av mode, and if I found the low light was making the speed too slow to hand-hold successfully, I upped the ISO to 400. I wasn't trying to achieve motion - quite the opposite, as I was trying to get that sense of stillness even though the light breeze made those little things shoot around as if they had outboard motors!
The shoe shoot was much quicker and dirtier (literally and metaphorically!). I just wanted to have something under my belt in case I get no other opportunities to shoot sport this week - as I said, I wouldn't be surprised if several of my fellow students turn up with no homework but I imagine that would be difficult for the tutor to hang his lesson from, so I'd like to have something. I didn't know what I wanted to do and just shot several frames of the shoes lying with the other cast-offs just outside the front door (yes, it is very much a "mud room) and also on their own elsewhere where the light was better. As I shot, (I tend to shoot first and think later, thank goodness for digital! :D ) I grew to like the red lining and the texture of the laces, and I suppose I was just playing with that. Concentrating on focus was hard especially when shooting down the length of the shoe with a narrow DOF, but in these few I pretty much got it where I wanted it, namely on the laces or the front red lining. I did a bit of PP on all of these - the sepia, obviously, but with the others to desaturate everything except the particular colour I was stressing. I can't decide whether to leave the muddy colour on the side in or desaturate it out - I keep going back to the file and changing the mask.
Having shot seventy zillion frames, tossed sixty zillion before I even downloaded them, tossed another however many in Bridge, and then tossed half of those once I saw them in Photoshop, I then spent a lot of the rest of the day in PP, mostly concentrating on colour and composition - I had so many that I tried not to waste time on any that I could see were technically wrong although they might have been okay from some other aspect. At the end of it, I really felt I couldn't "see" them any more. It's like saying a single word over and over, at the end of it you don't know what it means any longer. I have spent too much time fretting over the exact amount of this or that lily leaf to crop off that I can't judge any more - which is why I thought I would ask for some help from the forum.
Chris, if you want me to choose which one of the shoes in this thread I think is "best" I would say the sepia shoes - although I do plan on B&W-ing some of the other images just to see. But I agree, now that it's been pointed out, with a previous poster (sorry, forgotten name again :o) that the others are too close to be meaningful and yet not close enough to be abstract. I couldn't have put it into words myself until s/he said so. Technically I think No 4 is the best - bearing in mind that "technically" here, for me, was focus, and I quite like the way I've desaturated the colour out of everything except the inside of the shoe.
With regard to the water ones, again if you force me to choose today (couldn't have done it yesterday) I'd say Violet 8 - I like the reflections which are just the sort of thing I was after. I agree with previous posters that it specifically DOESN'T fulfill the criterion of "showing the background" (quite the opposite) but I really don't think that I need to be bound by that - despite all the ravings of other posters who clearly feel that I am being disrespectful and cavalier in my interpretation of the instructions!! Leaf 2 I like too, perhaps for the simplicity of the shape. I worked quite hard to bring out the reflection in PP and I think I did that successfully.
Do I like them? Yes I do. As they stand at the moment, I wouldn't be ashamed to show them to my photography class, as I wasn't ashamed to show them to you guys. I did so with an entirely different feeling from the one in which I posted my IR phots, for example, which I know are shocking technically despite all my efforts, and which I know are nothing at all from the point-of-view of content or composition - they are merely experiments gone horribly wrong. I like these images, and I won't be ashamed to use them in the calendar and possibly even run off a few copies to give to people like my parents, who (because they have to!) think everything I do is wonderful, and will hang them on their walls and tell anyone who comes near that the photos were taken by their "clever daughter." :D (PS that's a joke, people! I don't think I'm clever, but Mom does! Doesn't your Mom?) But I also know that it's very much the same phenomenon as every parent experiences the first time you take that new baby out into public - you can't believe that passers-by can actually just walk past this incredibly, glowingly, beautiful child without even so much as a second glance. I know that a lot of what makes me like these images is the effort that I put into making them, and the fact that they are mine. I can't see them with a "disinterested" eye - if I COULD do so, obviously I wouldn't be putting them up and asking for YOUR opinions, now, would I???? :)
I agree that I'm not shooting "with passion" or "emotion" (the article on Subtraction is great - thank you! :) ) - I'm just trying to do a bit of homework. It's homework that I have worked quite hard on for no reason other than I AM TRYING (notwithstanding what some posters here seem to feel) to improve my skills and especially my "seeing" but I fear (and I hope to be proved wrong) that I am not going to get a great deal out of this course only because it is the wrong course for me.
So can I ask, please don't jump down my throat again about my reasons for doing the course and/or my reasons for posting here and/or my reasons for doing photography at all and, for that matter, my soul!! :lol: (I have to say that I am completely mystified as to what prompted THAT rant - did he just hate my images? or the fact that I don't like boats? or the fact that I had the temerity to ask for C&C on a discussion forum?) Accept that my intentions, as they say, are honourable - namely to learn about photography! I'm doing it via any means I have at my disposal which includes this forum. If you think I am being dishonest by asking for help here, if I'm paying to get it on an evening course as well, then so be it. Don't give me any. If it makes you feel any better, I have every intention of mentioning the help that I have received here, just as I credited Tom Lusk's Maple leaf photo which provided the initial inspiration, and if I follow through with any of the ideas, I will certainly credit those people specifically if I am asked to "discuss my work" on Monday night.
To those people who have been kind enough to look and to then offer suggestions regarding the images, I thank you most sincerely. It is through ideas and suggestions like yours that one can take a step back and have a more disinterested look at what feels sometimes like your own flesh and blood. That said, I re-iterate that I am not afraid of criticism (or "critique" if you prefer.) If it's not constructive, I will try to shrug it off knowing that some people get their kicks by making others feel small. If it is constructive, (and even very negative comments can still be constructive if they are stated courteously and accompanied by suggestions for how the problem might have been avoided or could be put right) even if I and others on this forum disagree, I will certainly look at what you have to say and see whether it "makes sense" for me.
Now, Chris: I hope I have fulfilled my side of the bargain: what say you???
The other topic is also a very good one for Sydneysiders as many people here are fanatical "boaties" and again, will probably be going down to their marina to sail their "tinnie" sometime on the weekend. Again, it happens to be something I and my family don't do so once again, it's not a subject which is easy for me from the logistical point of view. Yes, I could of course make time to go down to a marina myself, and I might yet do so. Does going down to the marina count as "pushing myself?" I don't think so - I think I should be putting my effort into "pushing myself" with the actual photos I take, wherever I do it.
It so happened that yesterday I was home from work with a very sick daughter (right in the middle of her Final exams, poor thing! :( ) and so I found myself with time on my hands to start playing with the ideas. I couldn't go out to a marina, but I did have lovely reflective water in the little pond in my garden. I didn't have anyone taking part in a sport, just a sad and sweaty teenager trying to study Modern History on a couch, but I did have the only sporting equipment in the house, my husband's old shoes. And I could start playing with those while being around for my daughter.
Soooo... Chris (this is the loooongest reply to a short question, I'm really sorry, but there's a lot of undercurrent in this thread which is making me quite uncomfortable and I suppose I feel the need to justify and explain) perhaps the first thing I should say about my own photos, that has been picked up on by a couple of other posters, is that they are not really "about" anything and of course that makes them weaker before we even look at anything else. They are "about" having an assignment which I want to start working on, some Photoshop skills learned in a vacation on-line course that I want to practise, and some vague ideas of something that might work out if I experiment.
In the "something floating on water" pictures I was simply trying to get some pleasing shapes, with nice clear reflections to show they were on water. I liked the leaf for its simplicity of form and the way that Pentax produces that really RED red, and the violet because it was a much more complex shape and the way its reflections often didn't look at all like the part of the real flower you could see from the front. I tried other leaves, including yellow ones, and a lorikeet feather, none of which were successful.
Because I THINK (as I said, I haven't really been able to clarify it - I suppose I could email the tutor but again, that's not really something we do here in Australia) the assignment is really "about" practising manual focus, that was the technical skill I was trying to concentrate on. Because the day was very overcast and the pond is tucked deep under a tree on the shady side of the house, I had very little light available and I got a lot of camera or subject blur on many of the shots. I tried shooting on a tripod but my tripod is very elderly and shaky, (yes, don't tell me, maybe I should have used the $300 on a new tripod rather than a photography course!! :D) and I was actually better off shooting hand-held using SR and a faster ISO. So the reason I chose these particular shots for my "short list" was that they were all, IMO, in focus (although someone has already pointed out that one, at least, could use some sharpening - I had missed that, and that kind person, whoever it was (sorry to have forgotten your name :o) has done me a huge favour because those few words made me look even more critically at the focus.
The final cull on the "focus okay" list was on composition. I find it hard to quanitfy composition, but I "just liked" them all. I'm not a great believer in The Rule of Thirds but because I knew these pictures were going to be looked at critically by others, I did try to keep that in mind - does it follow the Rule of Thirds? If not, do I have a valid reason why not? You may notice that they are by no means all in the standard 4:3 (or whatever?) format - again, I don't believe (necessarily) in Golden Rectangles and things and crop to all sorts of shapes and ratios.
The specific questions you asked are hard to answer because I really was trying all sorts of variables. I experimented with camera angles from very close to the water and from almost directly above, and in the end decided that I was getting closest to the reflections I wanted by sticking to a sort of midway position (say an angle of about 40 deg to the water) because that cut out any background "stuff" (which, yes, according to the homework assignment I probably should have kept in) but still retained the reflections.
I experimented a lot with DOF too - with the water ones I tried to keep it shallow enough to throw the lily leaves out but still keep most of the subject in. With the flower I felt I needed to get the little yellow "eye" in focus because otherwise the whole image became uncomfortably "loose" if you know what I mean. In the ones in which it is visible, I think I generally succeeded, most of all in No 6. However, I think the version of that which I posted is actually a little too sharpened in the front white petals, where there's almost a sort of glitter, and I have subsequently softened them a little - not the rest of the image, just the white part of the two front petals.
With the leaves I concentrated most on the edge of the leaf as I really like that sinuous line. No 1 I think I missed it, either accidentally or deliberately, as the central vein is in focus and both edges are too soft, but I kept that one on my short list as I liked the shape of the leaf from that angle (the leaves and things were blowing around the pond and so I had to take what I could get sometimes!) I also, in nos 3 - 5, tried for a deeper DOF. In #3, the leaf's okay but I don't like the lily leaves quite so sharp (should I blur them? maybe); in the other two I just didn't quite nail it - it could have been poor focusing but it also could have been a bit of subject or camera blur - as I said, I didn't have a heap of available light. (Can one tell which it is?)
Shutter speed was not something I tried to control. I was in Av mode, and if I found the low light was making the speed too slow to hand-hold successfully, I upped the ISO to 400. I wasn't trying to achieve motion - quite the opposite, as I was trying to get that sense of stillness even though the light breeze made those little things shoot around as if they had outboard motors!
The shoe shoot was much quicker and dirtier (literally and metaphorically! :D). I just wanted to have something under my belt in case I get no other opportunities to shoot sport this week - as I said, I wouldn't be surprised if several of my fellow students turn up with no homework but I imagine that would be difficult for the tutor to hang his lesson from, so like to have something. I didn't know what I wanted to do and just shot several frames of the shoes lying with the other cast-offs just outside the front door (yes, it is very much a "mud room) and also on their own elsewhere where the light was better. As I shot, (I tend to shoot first and think later, thank goodness for digital! :D ) I grew to like the red lining and the texture of the laces, and I suppose I was just playing with that. Concentrating on focus was hard especially when shooting down the length of the shoe with a narrow DOF, but in these few I pretty much got it where I wanted it, namely on the laces or the front red lining. I did a bit of PP on all of these - the sepia, obviously, but with the others to desaturate everything except the particular colour I was stressing. I can't decide whether to leave the muddy colour on the side in or desaturate it out - I keep going back to the file and changing the mask.
Having shot seventy zillion frames, tossed sixty zillion before I even downloaded them, tossed another however many in Bridge, and then tossed half of those once I saw them in Photoshop, I then spent a lot of the rest of the day in PP, mostly concentrating on colour and composition - I had so many that I tried not to waste time on any that I could see were technically wrong although they might have been okay from some other aspect. At the end of it, I really felt I couldn't "see" them any more. It's like saying a single word over and over, at the end of it you don't know what it means any longer. I have spent too much time fretting over the exact amount of this or that lily leaf to crop off that I can't judge any more - which is why I thought I would ask for some help from the forum.
Chris, if you want me to choose which one of the shoes in this thread I think is "best" I would say the sepia shoes - although I do plan on B&W-ing some of the other images just to see. But I agree, now that it's been pointed out, with a previous poster (sorry, forgotten name again :o) that the others are too close to be meaningful and yet not close enough to be abstract. I couldn't have put it into words myself until s/he said so. Technically I think No 4 is the best - bearing in mind that "technically" here, for me, was focus, and I quite like the way I've desaturated the colour out of everything except the inside of the shoe.
With regard to the water ones, again if you force me to choose today (couldn't have done it yesterday) I'd say Violet 8 - I like the reflections which are just the sort of thing I was after. I agree with previous posters that it specifically DOESN'T fulfill the criterion of "showing the background" (quite the opposite) but I really don't think that I need to be bound by that - despite all the ravings of other posters who clearly feel that I am being disrespectful and cavalier in my interpretation of the instructions!! Leaf 2 I like too, perhaps for the simplicity of the shape. I worked quite hard to bring out the reflection in PP and I think I did that successfully.
Do I like them? Yes I do. As they stand at the moment, I wouldn't be ashamed to show them to my photography class, as I wasn't ashamed to show them to you guys. I did so with an entirely different feeling from the one in which I posted my IR phots, for example, which I know are shocking technically despite all my efforts, and which I know are nothing at all from the point-of-view of content or composition - they are merely experiments gone horribly wrong. I like these images, and I won't be ashamed to use them in the calendar and possibly even run off a few copies to give to people like my parents, who (because they have to!) think everything I do is wonderful, and will hang them on their walls and tell anyone who comes near that the photos were taken by their "clever daughter." :D (PS that's a joke, people! I don't think I'm clever, but Mom does! Doesn't your Mom?) But I also know that it's very much the same phenomenon as every parent experiences the first time you take that new baby out into public - you can't believe that passers-by can actually just walk past this incredibly, glowingly, beautiful child without even so much as a second glance. I know that a lot of what makes me like these images is the effort that I put into making them, and the fact that they are mine. I can't see them with a "disinterested" eye - if I COULD do so, obviously I wouldn't be putting them up and asking for YOUR opinions, now, would I???? :)
I agree that I'm not shooting "with passion" or "emotion" (yes, the article on Subtraction is great - thank you!) - I'm just trying to do a bit of homework. It's homework that I have worked quite hard on for no reason other than I AM TRYING (notwithstanding what some posters here seem to feel) to improve my skills and especially my "seeing" but I fear (and I hope to be proved wrong) that I am not going to get a great deal out of this course only because it is the wrong course for me.
So can I ask, please don't jump down my throat again about my reasons for doing the course and/or my reasons for posting here and/or my reasons for doing photography at all and, for that matter, my soul!! (I have to say that I am completely mystified as to what prompted THAT rant - did he just hate my images? or the fact that I don't like boats? or the fact that I had the temerity to ask for C&C on a discussion forum?) Accept that my intentions, as they say, are honourable - namely to learn about photography! I'm doing it via any means I have at my disposal which includes this forum. If you think I am being dishonest by asking for help here, if I'm paying to get it on an evening course as well, then so be it. Don't give me any. If it makes you feel any better, I have every intention of mentioning the help that I have received here, just as I credited Tom Lusk's Maple leaf photo which provided the initial inspiration, and if I follow through with any of the ideas, I will certainly credit those people specifically if I am asked to "discuss my work" on Monday night.
To those people who have been kind enough to look and to then offer suggestions regarding the images, I thank you most sincerely. It is through ideas and suggestions like yours that one can take a step back and have a more disinterested look at what feels sometimes like your own flesh and blood. That said, I re-iterate that I am not afraid of criticism (or "critique" if you prefer.) If it's not constructive, I will try to shrug it off knowing that some people get their kicks by making others feel small. If it is constructive, (and even very negative comments can still be constructive if they are stated courteously and accompanied by suggestions for how the problem might have been avoided or could be put right) even if I and others on this forum disagree, I will certainly look at what you have to say and see whether it "makes sense" for me.
Now, Chris: I hope I have fulfilled my side of the bargain: what say you???
