jreades

Necessary for what?

It depends on how strong your tripod is and what type of head it has. On my Bogen DigiPod there's *no* way that the ballhead will hold a 70-200/f4 minus a collar without slowly inching its way downwards. With the collar, the balance is much, much better and even something as light as the DigiPod can hold the lens/body combo steady.

Essentially, all the collar does is help you to align the centre of gravity of the lens/body with the mounting point for the tripod. This means that it takes less force to hold the full assembly stable while taking a picture. A much stronger tripod and head could probably hold an f4 lens stable even if attached to the camera body instead of the lens, but you're now placing a lot more force on the joint between the camera and lens than you were before.

So it's not necessary in the least, but it *can* be helpful for some types of shots and for minimising stresses on your gear.

jon

Check out the specs -- the aggravations of a mirror lens probably aren't worth it if you already have the 300mm lens to start with. The 2x TC will cost you 2 stops, slow down the AF, and, more importantly, cause *some* loss in image quality, but these pale next to the issues with mirror lenses: no AF at all, a max aperture in the f8 range, and quality-control issues when compared with the 300/f4.

If you had nothing and wanted to get yourself to 600mm then the mirror lens is a viable choice if you are on a budget (as I am... it's why I'm considering a mirror lens myself). Mirror lenses are radically cheaper to produce, but you can't get the lower cost without paying a fairly hefty price in terms of performance.

HTH,

jon

P.S. Have you looked at the 200-500mm zoom offerings from Tamron and Sigma. Those have been relatively well reviewed. The downside is that you are now carrying around a second long lens, the upside is that you don't have the 2-stop penalty of the 2x TC. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs, tradeoffs. :)

On the basis of the reviews, I just bought a Fuji F10 for my girlfriend as a 30th birthday present. This would replace her Canon film P&S -- which actually took *great* pictures except for the vignetting on some types of shots -- with something that enables her to just shoot without worrying about development cost or anything else.

Since the birthday hasn't happened yet (next weekend) I can't tell you how well it works (will check back when I have had a chance to play) but the reviews are certainly astounding, as is the apparent image quality.

jon

I can see the fun of a 'rate my photography web site' addition to the site, but I would hate to see something that sounds like it's likely to take quite some time to roll out sidetrack us from the original idea: a new forum topic for all things web-related. Since the latter would be no different from the Digital Darkroom or Canon EOS forums, I would be hope that it could be added fairly quickly. Could we do that first and then look at the more complex task?

If we are looking for sub-forums, I'd suggest (off the top of my head):

1. Web Site Reviews -- where people can ask for and receive a review of their web site with no rating attached or to recommend a site that they came across while surfing. Think of it as the future 'Critique Only' for sites.

2. Web Site Design/Presentation -- all things HTML, CSS, PS, and JS/DHTML-related. Basically, anything to do with the front-end to your site.

3. Web Site Scripting/Technologies -- all things RDBM, PHP, Perl, Java, AOLServer-related. Basically, anything to do with the back-end to your site.

4. Web Site Hosting/Domains -- everything to do with actually setting up your domain and web site on a 'live' site.

I'm a little leery of having web site ratings simply because the criteria there are even more bizarre than for photography in general. For instance, I can't wait 'til I get my first "Why did you give my site a 2/2 and say that it doesn't work in Firefox? What's Firefox and why should I care what doesn't work for you?" Or do we say "Given that you were using geocities, this site actually gets a 6/7 because I've never seen anyone make anything usable with their tool." Ah well, with luck this won't be an issue for a few months.

jon

<p>Fred Bonnet wrote:</p>

<blockquote>What does the future hold for MACs? Apple can not compete in the computer arena --- they have not made money is their computer business segment for several years --- their strategy would seem to be to abandon all their previous OSs and associated software and develop a high priced, PC like, machine. So, do you want to hitch your wagon to that strategy?</blockquote>

<p>Really? That would news to Apple, I'm sure. Last time I checked (admittedly, this was back in the 'dark years' when their stock was trading at about $14 and I picked up a few shares) Apple had something close to $8 <i>billion</i> in the bank. More than their market valuation at the time. I <i>also</i> know that they still make more money from shifting a few million desktops and laptops than they do from their iPod sales (see recent financials).</p>

<p>One could also argue that Dell, Sony, et al. seem to have a strategy of shipping an expensive, Mac-like machine. Every time Apple releases a new desktop system (iMac G3, iMac G4, iMac G5, to name the most obvious examples) they have to fend off a half-dozen imitators. Apple was the first company (that I'm aware of) to build a laptop with a metallic chasis and frame.</p>

<p>I'd also point out that abandonning an old OS (OS9) to take advantages of such features as pre-emptive multitasking and threading hardly constitutes a stupid decision. In fact, MS could probably have done away with whole classes of security vulnerabilities if they'd been willing to be a bit more aggressive in their rewrite. <i>And</i> I was actually still able to run OS9 for more than two years after making OSX my primary OS. Apple has also already demonstrated PPC applications running on Intel hardware for the next migration. Will it be as quick as native code? Of course not, but it'll work.</p>

<blockquote>

Owning a MAC defines you as being creative --- that is the same as saying you are no better than what you own. How can anyone disagree with such a lovely, consumer-society, sentiment?

</blockquote>

That's like saying that owning a PC defines you as being stupid. It's just plain dumb. I bought a Mac because it <i>worked</i> for me in a way that a PC didn't. I don't care what it says about me, I care that it works.</p>

<p>Now, before you run around panning Apple you might at least <i>try</i> the product. I have 3 OSes at home: OS X, Win 2K, Mandrake Linux, and 2 at work: WinXP, RedHat 9. Of them all, the Mac is what makes me feel like I'm able to do whatever I want most easily. They all work, but one works better for <i>me</i>.</p>

Oh, and I second the request that we stop using MAC when we mean Mac as a short-hand for Apple.

MAC stands for Media Access Control (also known as the physical or hardware address) is the unique (reprogrammable) id for a network card (Ethernet or modem) on an IP network.

So: MAC is for networking, and Mac is for retail sales.

Cheers,

jon

Based on your comment about being in a coffee shop, it sounds like you're using a portable (presumably a PowerBook) for you work. Apple's original TiBooks really led the way in the industry -- they were lighter, faster, and more beautiful than anything comparable from the Wintel world at the time.

Since then, as Intel has cranked out the Pentium-M chipsets and IBM has failed to crank out faster G4s or a mobile G5 this advantage has evaporated. In all probability, the lack of a competitive mobile chipset is the primary reason that Apple was forced to move to Intel last week.

The performance specs that you're citing were for dual G5s PowerMacs -- they are pretty fast, pretty sweet machines -- but you need to understand something important about benchmarks. There's the old adage: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Apple only ever shows you the Photoshop benchmarks at which their dual G5s excel. But before you get up in arms, it's worth noting that *all* companies do this. ATI and Nvidia were caught out for optimising their video drivers to perform particularly well on the Quake3 frame-rate test. PC makers will never show you the benchmarks at which a P4 (with its long pipeline) suck compared to Macs.

I'm sorry that you feel let down, but no one should have promised you that a Mac would be faster than an equivalent top-of-the-line PC. They are both tools that excel at some things but not at others. What value do you place on needing to reinstall Windows on an annual basis because of the crap gumming up the registry? What value do you place on knowing that your machine hasn't been 0wn3d? Of course, it's possible to lock down a PC to the same extent, but to do that I needed to download and install ZoneAlarm, Spybot S&D, AdAware, Mozilla, Thunderbird, and learn how to use regedit. All I had to do on my Mac was turn it on. However much time I might lose against the latest Pentium-M chipset (an advantage that will disappear when Apple moves to the dual-core Pentium-D chipset along with everyone else) I've more than made it up by not having to download and manually install endless updates to the system.

A lot of graphic designers and artist types *do* prefer Apple machines simply because it's what they are used to. You get used to one way of doing things, and as long as the advantages to switching aren't clear

then you're not going to do so. XP *does* have many of the features that were missing from earlier Windows systems in terms of stability, performance, colour calibration, etc., but when your Mac is still doing all of these things perfectly well too then why would you retrain on to a different system without a specific reason to do so? Price is one part of it (and is why some people leave Apple for good), but for many people a few hundred dollars is not sufficient if you've figured out all of the keyboard shortcuts and have an effective workflow (e.g. one using AppleScript or Automator).

Anyway, if you have an Aluminium PowerBook with 1GB of RAM and decide to have a garage sale, please let me know and if the price is right I'd be happy to buy it... I'm still working on a 667MHz TiBook but don't want to invest in anything new until I can get a dual-core Pentium-D. :)

jon

After a good bit of online research (here and dpreview, to name a few places) I recently purchased an Epson R800 and have been duly impressed by the quality of what comes out in the 'basket'. B&W took a little work to get going, but the colour prints were great before I even got around to calibrating my monitor (visually) and tracking down updated ICC profiles.

I think it really comes down to how often you intend to print things out and what you intend to print. The R800 is useless if you want to print larger than A4. In my case, I figured that A3, A2, A... was a limit case that I would use for probably one photo in every thousand when I got bored of what was already on my wall and wanted something for the next five years. That said, nothing about the R800 output makes me think that it *couldn't* go on a wall in a gallery, it just can't go in one of those big frames.

For the larger prints, I'd go to a pro-lab and let them output it on a fancy Frontier or something. But for day-to-day usage (i.e. for someone who isn't hanging their work in a gallery or selling it to others) then the R800 more than meets my needs and it cost less than $500 to boot (not counting consumables, natch)!

I've used the R800 to make lots of prints as little gifts for friends and family -- whack in an A4 sheet, print it out, grab a simple frame from your local shop, and voila, a gift that runs less than 15 quid and looks thoughtful too. The fact that I actually enjoy printing out my work to give to others is a little bonus that I don't bother to mention ("Yes, you're right, I spent a long time calibrating everything to get just this effect for you [the fact that once the computer is calibrated it's pretty straightforward except for periodic recalibration is the icing on the cake]").

The flip side to all of this is that if you *don't* do much printing then spending $400-odd on a printer and another $100-odd on inks is not a great investment. If you only want to print three or four photos (and one copy each) a month then you should price things out at a pro-lab. I tried Ofoto once for printing and was pretty disappointed by the output (since they shop it out to the nearest local lab) -- the output was so grainy that I felt that I actually *seeing* the ink dots. Dont' know how a consumer-level lab would do, maybe you should take a couple of photos round and see how they do and how much it costs?

HTH,

jon

Yann,

Votre question ira mieux dans le forum pour "Digital Cameras" puis-qu'il ne s'agit pas d'un probleme avec photo.net.

A mon avis vous prennez deja de tres bon photos. Un meilleur appareil vous permetrez d'avoir plus de control (et donc *peut-etre* de meilleurs photos) mais il n'est *point necessaire*. Peut-etre vous avez un ami que vous permettrez d'empreunter son SLR pour que vous puissiez voir pour vous meme?

Cheers, (and rusty French)

jon

You have several different ways to look at this problem, and the answer depends a bit on how much money you have lying around now and how much you expect to have in a couple of years...

1. First off, do you intend to upgrade all of your Adobe software in the near future? If so, when? If you're still running, say, PS 7.x then you won't benefit as much from buying an expensive G5 and you've got something that wouldn't run on the new Mactel machines either (except through the rather more expensive -- from a system point of view, it'll be free with 'Leopard' -- Rosetta technology). If you already have CSx then you will benefit from the faster system right now and you can probably skip the immediate swich to Mactel in a couple of years' time.

2. I should point out that it's perfectly possible to run Tiger and Photoshop on G4 systems. For example, my PBG4 667MHz. Of course, it's not as sprightly as it would be on a G5, but I'd say that your return on investment depends a bit on how much of your workflow is digital. The more time you spend in digital processing, the greater the returns on upgrading now rather than waiting.

3. You do *not* need to wait for the Intel-based Macs just because of compatibility. You're going to see fat binaries from Adobe and MS for at least the next six years, which is probably the point by which you'll be wanting to look for a new system. Also, Apple is going to be doing some *major* re-engineering for the Intel chips and I would expect their first few releases to have some serious technical issues (think early TiBooks and AlBooks).

4. Do not buy the top-of-the-line Macs. On a price/performance curve you'll usually find that the second-from-the-top model offers the best blend, with the third-from-the-top being the next best choice. You always pay a premium for the fastest chips that is rarely worth it unless you're expensing it on your taxes.

5. If you're comfortable with it, then buy your memory from a third-party. I would avoid Crucial since their chips have a history of compatibility problems. Ramjet should be fine. I'd go with as much RAM as you can afford if you're a serious PS user, otherwise something over 1GB and less than 2GB should be sufficient.

6. Don't forget that Apple offers refurbished machines! With the money that you save there I would get Apple's 3-year support contract since you don't really know why the machine was returned to Apple and you could get a lemon. In this case, you want to be covered.

7. Another interesting tactic would be, as suggested, going with the Mini as a stop-gap -- smaller and faster than what you have now, but note that it's not expandable. You get a sub-$600 machine that can be relegated to the kids' room or the living room in mid-2007 without a second thought when the Intel machines start coming out in bulk. You can already buy add-on storage that is designed to fit right underneath it and gives you an extra 2 or 3 USB and Firewire ports.

8. Would you want to go mobile? Chances are that even the iBooks now have faster G4s than your desktop. In one swoop you'd gain mobility and a system upgrade. Again, the value here depends a bit on how much time you spend doing digital work. If it's a lot then I'd probably look at the PowerBooks. If it's some but not tons then an iBook is currently very good value for money. All iBooks now have faster chips than my 3 year-old PB, but I still use it for PS work on a bi-weekly basis.

I don't have any 'answers' but hopefully you can use this to prioritise and clarify your options a bit.

jon

Chances are you are embedding additional information that is not being handled correctly. The most likely problem is that you are somehow embedding the thumbnail preview image despite using the save for web option. If you see anything other than the default "JPG" icon in the Finder/Windows Explorer then this is almost certainly what has happened. Alternately, have you checked the file size?

You don't really give enough detail for anyone to do more than speculate... it's a bit like saying: "My browser stopped working and I can't see web pages any more. Can someone tell me why?"

jon

Giampi is correct. Do *not* reinstall the drivers -- aside from being completely unecessary, it may muck up your existing colour profiles.

The main thing would be rename each printer in the Print Manager application so that they cannot easily be confused. I would probably call one "Colour 1290" and the other "Black And White 1290". I would avoid the '&' in the printer name simply because it might qualify as a 'special' character and give you problems down the line.

If Apple's print manager app does not allow you to rename the printers then you might need to go through the CUPS interface. You will need to turn the built-in web server on first (under "System" -> "Sharing") and then use your web browser to go to: http://127.0.0.1:631/

You would then switch between the two printers when you go to print using the print dialogue.

That should do the trick.

jon

P.S. I'm not sitting in front of a Mac right now so the names of the applications may be slightly off.

I use this lens with an Elan7 and have been quite happy with it. You can undoubtedly find quite a few samples in my portfolio -- typically the landscapes and architecture photos -- and see for yourself (although I don't have any 100% crops hanging around... I'd offer to post some but I'm in the middle of moving house).

My biggest gripe is with the vignetting at the short end when used wide open. But then, given your 1.6x crop factor I doubt that you'd even see this issue in your photos.

I don't really know enough to comment on the crop that you've posted. My immediate reaction is that the camera has focussed on something else entirely and that this accounts for the softness of the crop. Of course, without searching through the entire frame it's impossible to verify this.

Since you have a digital camera and no developing costs, have you considered running some tests of your own to see if it's your technique or your lens? I would suggest setting up some simple targets in a variety of lighting situations and shooting them both from a tripod and handheld to see if anything turns up.

HTH,

jon

A few random thoughts:

1. I expect that some hardware hackers will figure out ways to make OS X run on off-the-shelf Intel hardware. Worst case is that Apple picks up some extra software sales and loses, what, a few thousand orders? It's not like your average designer or grandma is going to call up the local hardware shop and say: "build me something that will probably work with my bootleg copy of OSX."

2. Even if you *could* run OSX on your Dell, unless the cost differential is massive I would have to ask you this: why? Would you *rather* use a Dell laptop, or one designed like the current crop of PowerBooks? Just because Apple is switching to Intel chips doesn't mean they're firing the industrial designers who really make Apple shine.

3. PowerPC has lost steam completely. Perhaps you'd get a G5 laptop in a year, or you could get an Apple-made dual-core Pentium D in about the same timeframe. Personally, much as I'll miss PowerPC I'd rather have a cooler-running DP laptop with flexible clock speeds. IBM now sees itself as a designer and not a manufacturer, and their work is all being directed towards the Cell architecture for Sony and Toshiba. Apple needed to do something or we'd all be saying that they were irrelevant when we can get quad-core Intel systems while Apple still hasn't broken 3 GHz.

4. Yes, Apple will lose some software writers. If they lost Adobe or MS, they'd be dead. Just about everyone else is expendable in the short term. Look at this way: if Apple is able to leverage the lower cost of Intel chip sets to churn out systems that are more price-compatible with an equivalent Windows system (Apple's supply-chain is *very* tight, they don't often get credit for that) then they're likely to *build* market share. Are the developers going to be so pissy that they'll sacrifice a 10% market share out of pure spite for the fact that Apple didn't stick to an apparently dying chip architecture (obviously RISC isn't dying, but the PowerPC chip is *not* turning out to be a good one for desktop systems because of IBM's lack of attention).

5. I suspect that Apple's hardware sales will take a hit in the short term. I had been dreaming of a new Mac, but I'll now try to eake out another 18 months on my crusty old PB G4 667 (if it doesn't make it then I'll buy a G5 system anyway). But my cousin, who is starting university for architecture this fall, is still going to need a new computer and her uni is still recommending Macs. I'll probably guide her towards the less expensive end of the range on the assumption that she'll want a new Intel Mac in about 28 months' time, but she's still going to buy something in August regardless of this change.

6. The 'universal binaries' should make the process marginally less painful. I would expect the next few major releases from Adobe, MS, and other major vendors to be 'universal binaries' that will run on both platforms. Looking out 4 years I'd imagine that you'll see fewer cross-platform binaries, but if Apple can make it effectively painless to release dual-architecture binaries once the initial work of moving to Xcode 2.1 is done then there's no penalty for software writers to continue releasing both indefinitely.

I'm not 100% happy about this change -- I'd always hoped that the G5 would pull Apple ahead of the Intel platform in some way. But since it's become abundantly clear that this is never going to happen I'm quite happy to see Apple making a move to the best desktop architecture available and it's the one with the best price/performance characteristics to boot. To the person who suggested that Apple won't change its pricing, my response would be: customers will change it for them. Now that it'll be possible to directly compare Dell systems to Apple systems Apple will be forced to adjust their pricing to the point where people can quantify by their buying preferences exactly how much they are willing to pay for the design and OS.

jon

I think that the question is this: can you afford to lose your entire investment if the seller is bogus? If the answer is 'no', then you need to look at ways to validate both the seller and the product before the transaction is completed. Most of these will probably involve some kind of additional cost to you, but it's the cost of peace of mind.

There are, I would think, a few ways to do this:

1. Do you live anywhere near the seller? Can you see the item in person before paying for it? Will the seller be near you in the near future?

2. How about using some kind of escrow service? I know that EBay offers this as an add-on, but I *believe* that the escrow service that they use is not tied solely to ebay transactions.

With escrow you pay a percentage of the transaction value to the escrow service, they will debit you/your card for the *full* amount + their cost, but the seller will not be paid until you have told them that it was 'as described' and the transaction can be completed. The benefit for the seller is that they know that the money is available before shipping the product, so as long as they ship the right product they *should* get paid (unless someone tried to pull a fast one and keep the product but also deny payment... I assume that the escrow service has some way of minimising this risk).

3. Pay with a credit card. Most cards cover you against fraudulent transactions. The problem is that most individual sellers are not geared up to handle their own credit card transactions since they won't have a merchant account.

4. Note that neither PayPal nor your credit card company will cover you for paypal transactions. The problem appears to be that the card company sees itself as covering the paypal transaction itself, not the transaction that was behind the paypal transfer. Since the transfer is always successful ("Why yes, I did authorise the transfer of this amount of money to the recipient.") your card company normally sees its responsibility as ending there. Paypal denies any responsibility for anything other than rampant fraudulent billing (and sometimes it's work to get them to cover that). *Some* people have managed to get a card company to deny a PayPal transcation, but not many so be *very* careful if you chose to go through PayPal.

I'm not sure what other options you might have, but escrow and a direct credit card transaction are most likely the best options, and I'd be very careful with a card transaction to make sure that it's done in a way that covers you fully.

HTH,

jon

If you are flying out of Europe or North America you almost certainly will *not* be allowed to take a photo on the plane, and especially if you plan to do so for commercial purposes. There would be two reasons for this:

1. Security -- if your camera is pointed vaguely in the direction of the pilot's cabin then you could be doing 'reconnaisance'. You really don't want to piss off airline security and the flying sherrifs that they have in the US.

2. Copyright -- you'll probably find that most of the plane's interior is copyrighted (in some way shape or form) by the airline. You cannot mistake a BA cabin for a Delta one, so in a commercial context you might be seen to be exploiting their visual identity in some way.

As for taking a tripod, it's a lottery and you're better off just packing it in your checked luggage.

jon

I bought a used 4000 from B&H for less than the cost of a new V[0]. I got all the bulk handling features and only lost the DEE processing... for me it was a good tradeoff.

jon

[0] It works fine over here in England, I just changed the plug.

PerlMonks (www.perlmonks.org) uses a reputation system derived from votes awarded to the posts that people make. Since the only group of online people more unruly and petty than photographers is geeks this gives me hope that there *are* systems that can work.

The way perlmonks works is as follows:

1. New accounts start off with the ability to post any question/response they care to. They get 10 votes per day and start off with zero reputation points.

2. If a user likes/hates your question or response they can use one of *their* votes to vote your question/response either up or down. Each up-vote gives you one reputation point. Each down-vote takes away one reputation point. You can only vote on a question/response once.

3. After you have received a total of 20 reputation points you are 'promoted' to the next level and can now cast 15 votes per day. The next level is 40 reputation (i.e. up-votes on things that you post to the site) away. The one after that is 80. And so on.

4. Each time that you are promoted you gain new privileges -- the ability to simply delete posts by others, your own home page, etc., etc.

This system is hardly foolproof, since a gang of people *could* up-vote each other repeatedly or down-vote someone else repeatedly. However, because I can also down-vote those people, you can bet that I will down-vote a "Wow. 7/7" comment and so undermine the usefulness of useless critiques (as I'm likely to lose more to the down-votes from irritated users than I am likely to gain up-votes from the person I've made friends with).

It also curtails the impact of robots since they can't participate in discussions at all. All in all, it's an interesting take since only by participating can I gain the up-votes that would eventually take me to point of being a forum moderator or someone with the potential to abuse the system by having lots of votes to throw around.

If there were some way of combining votes that can be cast on photos with votes that can be cast on other people's critiques then you encourage everyone to be more selective in what they vote on and how. Alternately, you could just keep the two things completely separate but use the critique-voting system as a way to cultivate and identify dedicated photo.net participants who are good candidates for becoming list moderators.

jon

<p>You're looking at the wrong sort-order for what you want.</p>

<p>"Rate Recent (Sum)" shows the photos for which the *sum* of all ratings gives the biggest number. So my 10 2/2 rates (for a sum of 40 [2 * 10 + 2 * 10 = 40]) trumps your 2 7/7 rates (for a sum of 28 [2 * 7 + 2 * 7 = 28]). You want "Rate Recent (Average)"</p>

<p>I did my best to answer this question here: <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00CFDH">www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00CFDH</a>, although I cannot claim any inside knowledge of the code so I may have some of the specifics wrong.</p>

Vasilis -- that is one of the *best* typos I've seen on photo.net and has quite made my morning. I, for one, would like to see 'gratings' become the new term.

Think how much more to-the-point our flame wars will be when we can just write: "I find your gratings really irritating," or "I'm tired of playing the gratings game."

Genius! :)

jon

7/7! Wow! Great post Timothy. Did you know that we're from the same town/city/country? We should rate each other highly so that we both get on to TRP!

... or ...

You bastard! What do you know about photography? Why did you give me a 2/4 when you can't shoot straight yourself? In my opinion your photos suck too and since your rate was unfair I'm going to give all of your photos a 1/1 in return. I would have made TRP if you hand't rated my photo so low.

By only using the anonymous ratings from the "Rate Recent" queue for the *default* TRP (note: you can always view things the old way by changing the drop-down) Brian has managed to dramatically limit the usefulness of mate-rating because I can no longer tell if my rates rated me highly when they came across my photo in the queue and they can't affect my TRP status my just going straight to my portfolio and rating everything 7/7. You may not have noticed if you don't subscribe to the site feedback forum, but the number of complaints about mate rating went from better than 20 per day to, effectively, zero. That alone suggests that the change was worth it.

As for Antonio's comment -- it *would* be nice if there were a reputation-style system so that as you participated more, you got more 'votes' (i.e. rates), but it's not your right to say that only people who post images can rate others' work. Only people who are in politics get to vote? If you're unhappy with the ratings then just ignore them, or don't submit photos for ratings, just go for critiques.

jon

Uh, Floyd, quit sounding like a jerk. You sound like you have *some* idea what goes on on the backend (though I'd like you to name one other site that uses AOL Server), so you must know that what you want to have happen is a lot like, say, trying to get from one car into another (along with all of your photography gear) while travelling at 75mph down the interstate? Operational systems under heavy load do *not* turn on a dime.

Sites like c|net or the New York Times *do* make changes to their sites, but they do it slowly and very, very carefully. And they have whole teams of people working to develop, Q/C, and roll out the changes. We have Brian and, I think, a couple of volunteers. And they are also responsible for handling every single technical issue that crops up whether big or small. And Brian is not getting paid loads of dosh to do this either.

Think about what you did online in 1991. This thing runs on AOL server for god's sakes, so it doesn't get much worse than that. But if you can get everyone to sign off on, say, a couple of weeks' downtime (after four or five months of full-time development work to prep the new site and come up with a migration tool to get all of the data from one schema to another) for the entire site I'm sure that Brian would be happy to ditch this system and start over from scratch with a site that supports all of the 'modern' conveniences.

I think that the recent changes to the rating system *do* make it clear that Brian et al. listen to our complaints and gripes. But what they can't do is respond to every member's whim. It takes time to see good proposals and ideas float to the top and win general (but never universal) acceptance or odium.

If you're so unhappy then what are you still doing here? You must get *something* out of sticking around photo.net, reading the forum postings, and so forth. If you're not then you are 100% correct and you should go find a site that tries harder to do what *you* want them to. Like everyone here, I'm not 100% happy with the way things run (I'd like to see a new page/section/post about what changes are in the works for the next release so that people could stop re-hashing the *same* arguments), but I do get something out of it, however infuriated I get at times. It makes my involvement worthwhile and makes me happy to pay some small amount towards photo.net's costs.

It's a bit like a building -- if the thing is still standing it's a success. :)

jon

Aside from not liking to see the term "The Final Solution" on any subject not related to Nazi policy in the 30s and 40s, I find Reuben's idea to be a *very* interesting one.

The question that Michael was getting at is that people don't always immediately submit a photo for critique. Of course, this is *common*, but it's not necessary. So I could upload a picture on Monday but not submit it for critique until Friday. What would its status be during that period?

Not only that, but *everyone* is limited in terms of how many critiques they can request in a given period. So unless you intend to say that "all photos are submitted for critique when they are submitted and you can only upload 'x' photos per day/week to ensure that you don't dominate the rate recent queue", then you have a bit of a dilemma.

This process also blows away the possibility of direct rating if you completely lock a photo down after critiquing. If I can't rate someone else's photo that I happened to come across because I saw an interesting critique that they had made and wanted to explore their work, then it's going to cut down a lot on people's exchanges outside the rate recent queue.

However, I *do* think that by merging the recent changes (rate recent rates are anonymous, direct rates aren't) with Reuben's idea we have something interesting to work with.

1. Make all critique responses anonymous -- this applies to both the rate-recent, the categorised critique requests, and the critique-only lists. [the big downside to this is that I can't see the work in context -- personally, if I'm going to review on the negative side then I try to look at the rest of the portfolio so that I can pick out things that the photographer *is* doing well]

2. Keep all direct rates explicit [i.e. with name attached, not explicit in the nude-review sense ;) ].

3. Use some method to 'lift' anonymity after a set period of time and show me the photographer's name in both a *both* rater's and the ratee's list. If the rater has no way of ever finding out who he/she rated then they can never follow-up their comments.

Thoughts?

jon

<p>I couldn't find anything that did quite what I wanted, so I wrote my own in PHP. It's been loosely designed so that you can use any of the following methods for laying out the portfolio/gallery:</p>

<ol>

<li>'Drag-and-Drop' -- create a folder on the remote server, drop pictures into it, they'll appear on the site based on Unix sort-order using the file name as the basis for the image name.

<li>Text-only configs -- create a specially-named file, add images to it using an array-style format and it you can have a title, comment, and custom-order.

<li>Database -- haven't written this part yet, but the methods are all in place so that you could switch from a text-only config to one pulling from a database to get title, comments, custom-order, etc.

</ol>

<p>You can see it in 'action' at <a href="http://www.reades.com/photos/Costa_Rica">www.reades.com/photos/Costa_Rica</a>. If you're feeling up to some PHP coding then I'd love some help in making this more powerful that it is now and then releasing it as OpenSource to whoever finds it useful.</p>

<p>The other 'features' that it supports are creating a thumbnail view and mid-sized view from the full-sized file, all with a small copyright notice written into the bottom-right corner. I'd like to improve this to make it more of a water-mark but haven't yet figured out how to get the watermark effect from PHP. It also has a simple 'slideshow' feature that is done with Javascript from a drop-down menu in the upper-right-hand corner of the mid-sized view.</p>

<p>Let me know if it's at all relevant for what you want to do.</p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

<p>Jon</p>

Logically, I think that the answer is as follows:

1. Any photographer who goes "Gallery" -> "Rate Recent" and proceeds to rate photos from that point onwards will have his/her ratings anonymised (call this "anonymous" from here on).

2. Any photographer who rates a photo through any other mechanism (call this "direct" from here on) has their rating of that photo attached to his/her name.

3. I *think* that the date-range (24 hours, 3 days, Week, Month, 3 Months, etc.) constrains the selection to only photos that were added to photo.net during the time selected (this is why photos that got 7/7s a year ago can't be seen in the 3 month view). I'm not quite sure how photos that have a 7/7 average over the past 24 hours don't get into the 3 month view (although this is actually a good thing). Anyway, I've called this the "relevant period" throughout my explanation below.

Again, working from logic, the TRP views are then defined as:

1. Average -- cumulative average of *all* rates for both originality and aesthetics whether direct or anonymous. This is the same as the 'old' rating system that Brian recently updated because of mate rating abuse. So a photo that received one rate from a friend of 7/7 would rank above one that received eight rates of 6/6 from random strangers.

2. Sum -- the cumulative sum of *all* rates for both originality and aesthetics whether direct or anonymous. This is the same as the 'old' rating system. So a photo that received ten rates of 4/4 would rank above a photo that received one rate of 7/7.

3. Rate Recent Average -- this is the cumulative average for anonymous ratings *only*. Same logic as for above, but making mate-rating more difficult because I can't *know* that you rated my photo 7/7 *and* I have to have clicked through all of the other Rate Recent photos to get to yours.

4. Rate Recent Sum -- this is the cumulative sum for anonymous ratings *only*. Same logic as for above, but making mate-rating more difficult because I can't *know* that you rated my photo 7/7 *and* I have to have clicked through all of the other Rate Recent photos to get to yours.

5. Originality -- same as old rating system so it uses anonymous and direct ratings. Looks like it's based on the average rating for originality.

6. Aesthetics -- same as old rating system so it uses anonymous and direct ratings. Looks like it's based on the average rating for aesthetics.

7. Ratings -- number of ratings (regardless of rate value) from both direct and anonymous ratings.

8. Comments -- number of comments, not ratings dependent.

9. Views -- not ratings-dependent.

10. Highest of the Day -- the photo whose ratings (using the cumulative average of direct and anonymous rates) over the period selected is highest for that day. So if I look at the three-day view, then I am only considering ratings given during that three-day period. If I switch to the week view then the 'highest' changes because my time period under consideration is for all ratings made in the past week. This one is kind of confusing to me.

11. Photo of the Week -- not sure how this works.

12. Photographer Highest -- take the highest rated photo added in the relevant time period (by getting cumulative average for direct and anonymous [i think] ratings for originality and aesthetics and then adding the two numbers together, I think) for each photographer and then sort them by average. So if I had one photo rated 7/7 *once* in the past 24 hours it will rank higher than the photo that someone else took that was rated 6/6 twenty times in the past 24 hours, but *both* have to have been added to photo.net in the past 24 hours. This is limited to one photo (probably highest average for relevant period) per photographer.

13. Photographer Average -- I *think* that this is the same as "Photographer Highest" but takes into account all photos in the photog's portfolio added in the relevant time period. So if I added two photos in 24 hours and each was rated 7/7 once then I would rank higher than someone who added two photos in 24 hours and each was rated 6/6 ten times. This is limited to one photo (probably highest average rate for relevant period) per photographer.

14. Photog's Sum (Ratings) -- this is the sum of all ratings (direct and anonymous I would *guess*) for a given photographer's portfolio but is limited to ratings added in the past 'x' days (I think). So a photographer with one photo rated 4/4 50 times will actually rank higher than a photographer with five photos rated 7/7 once. This is limited to one photo (probably highest average from relevant part of portofolio) per photographer.

15. Photog's Sum (Photos) -- as it says in the headline: "Photos from Last 3 Days Ranked by Photograpers's Sum of Photo Averages" So here the photographer with five 7/7 photos would rank higher than the one with one 4/4 rated fifty times. This would probably be calculated using both direct and anonymous ratings and is limited to one photo (probably highest averge rating from relevant part of portfolio) per photog.

16. Folder Views -- not ratings dependent.

Generally, the ones further down are more abstract concepts -- things like "I want to see each photographer's best work in the past week but I want that sorted by the average rating on that photo". This would be a good way to see a wide variety of well-rated work.

I've never really dug into the TRP pages, but now that I've tried to explain some of these concepts they seem quite interesting.

I'd be interested in seeing some new options like:

1. Standard Deviation -- find photos with the widest range of ratings (would be useful for finding controversial photos)

2. Mode -- sort photos by their most common rating (would be useful for filtering out some types of retaliation or mate-rating)

Anyway, I'm sure Brian has other things to do.

HTH,

jon