vdhamer

<p>There is a posting on this on my website:<br>

http://peter.vdhamer.com/2009/04/02/red-ufos-during-long-exposures-with-canon-24-104mm-f4l-lens/</p>

Bob Atkins wrote: <I>"Show me an image that gets an originality rating of 1 and deserves it. There must to a least one totally unoriginal image in the gallery somewhere. I'd just like to see how it differs from those which get a 4 or 5."</I><P>

OK. I will show you an <B>O=2</B> instead because most of us don't give 1's. It is actually quite convenient to reserve the score of 1 to pick off the crackpots and "rating abuse" types.<P>

I scanned through my 270-odd ratings. Some data on my ratings for calibration purposes: I apparently give on average O=4.5, I occasionally give out 7's, but normally never drop under 3, I regularly have 2 points difference between E and O, so I at least I think about it.<P>

Here is the only photo I have ever given an O=2:

<A HREF="http://www.photo.net/photo/1746648">

http://www.photo.net/photo/1746648</A>

It is a photo of "the" Tower Bridge in London (which is roughly the London equivalent of the Eifel Tower). The photo was taken on a color digital camera, but converted (in camera or at home) to sepia.<P>

Here is my comment I wrote at the time to justify the rating: <I>"If this had been in color, it would look like hundreds of other snapshots of the Tower Bridge taken each day. How does a conversion to sepia help?".</I> It arguably deserves a 1, but let's make it a 2 because the photographer explicitly took the non-trivial initiative to convert it to B/W - something which the other 100 tourists on the same boat that day will not have done.

And again, I never give 1's.<P>

My working criteria of Originality is roughly <I>"If the photographer told you about an idea for this photo, how would you rate the idea"</I>. In this case the answer might be something like

<I>"I'm on this tourist cruise boat about to pass under the bridge, so I walk all the way to the front of the boat to get the boat out of sight."</I> I personally don't think that sepia was part of the original plan, but was added because the photographer suspected that some modification was needed to make it look more interesting.

<P>My interpretation of AEsthetics is simply "How visually pleasing did the photo turn out" = "Would you hang it on a wall" = "How long did you look at the photo?" = "Did you smile when you saw the photo".