Kostas, et al., I think I was referring to the drifting from the "good old days" in my rant/post about a month or so ago, when the gallery was full every week, and with such a wide range of images. I sometimes wonder what has happened to the active members of those days, including (but in no way limited to) Reverend Sidney Flack... although I don't miss the flames ignited and fanned by Jan Faul and Bob Rosen... I am sure I am not alone in saying I would like to see the exhibitions reattain the levels of participation and creativity it once had. Often, I think that some people are too busy Photoshopping their images -- spawning dozens of versions from a single capture -- to go out and create, to "shoot and post what ya got"... Masterpieces and millionaires were once in short supply. These days, though, they have become commonplace, and it has become too easy to follow tangents from an original visual idea, too easy to become distracted from the original creative process, too easy to lose one's own sense of visual style and technique. How many people could look at one of your photographs (or mine) and correctly identify the photographer? As the new year approaches, always a good opportunity to shift gears and steer a new course, I will be concentrating more on the previsualized image and fine-tuning my personal style and in-camera technique, maybe even going so far as to uninstall Photoshop and save money by acquiring a more-or-less rudimentary scanner, and handling brightness/contrast tweaks in ACDSee... but making final prints from the original 4x5s. Darin Heinz Melbourne, Florida USA
