> -----Original Message----- > From: Alan P. Hayes [mailto:ahayes@berkshire.rr.com] > > I've been finding myself vaguely dissatisfied with the Gallery and > have decided to express some of my thoughts about it with the hope of > spurring some discussion with an eye to possible changes in that area. > > Submissions cover a very wide range of subject style and quality. > This can be frustrating, particularly in relation to reviewing the > gallery, there are quite a few instances where I'm not sure of my > ability to avoid being either insensitive or ignorant. I recognize that perhaps most of my gallery reviews are either insensitive, ignorant or on a really good day both. I generally look quite hard at a photo to try and find something I can relate to and therefore make a positive comment about but there are times when I just can't relate to the image and quite often that is due to my ignorance. I just don't have the artistic or photographic background that many of the list members possess. I don't know 99% of the famous photographers mentioned on the list and I always have to spend 30 minutes looking up references in Luis' posts. So sure, sometimes people get offended when I say I don't understand or can't relate to an image but hey, what else can I say? Other times I'm just in one of those 'moods' where my brain shifts a bit in my head and nothing but insensitivity spills out but of course that's a biological thing and I am powerless to stop it. > I feel that a lot of the time the gallery submissions suffer from > being crunched into the available space. I know I often see pictures > that seem likely to be lacking in technical ways which may be mostly > the result of being jpegged down. Also, I know I have submitted > pictures that lost quite a bit when reduced to meet the gallery specs. I don't see the 50k limit as a hindrance at all. To me, calling the gallery guidelines a limitation is like complaining that the x-rays I tried to take with a roll of Tmax didn't turn out or complaining that the mural sized print I made from my Minox negative is too grainy. You've got a 50k chunk of cyber space to fill with an image. Take that into consideration when you take the image and shoot to fill that space not to cover the side of a building. Yeah its more of a challenge but I can't see how it would do anything but make one a better photographer. Remember, don't blame the tools, blame the photographer. Greg Fraser http://users.imag.net/~lon2251/Gallery/
