ricardojmendez

Dustin,

I don't see where you're going with the digital camera or scanner point. From what I see, these would only matter as a way to get your image onto Photo.net - and if you can't get it into Photo.net, then it's out of the Print-Trade issue altogether. From then on, the picture can be produced by whatever means you wish - printing from the negative, inkjet, etc.

Even if you don't have an ass-kicking inkjet printer at home (I'm still not sure mine qualifies for the purposes of the project) digital files can always be printed on a lab with a Frontier, Shutterfly or other services.

The A-likes-B-but-B-doesn't-like-A is solved, in part, by the print credits approach. As long as somebody wants a print from A, he's good. If nobody ever wants a print from A... who knows, maybe people with extra credits can give them away, or A just will spend his alloted starting credits and that would be it.

I actually think the credit approach is going to be a better judge of what people think of a photo than the ratings. Giving an image two sixes doesn't set you back anything and you can do it on a whim. Ordering a print will remove a credit from your account (costing you an imaginary value but having the real cost of not being able to ask for other prints in its place), so I believe people will be more critical when assigning credits than they are with ratings.

Ricardo

I like the spirit, but I don't do much macro work myself (no decent equipment at hand).

I assume you want to give everyone a password for the account, so that all can upload images anonymously?

I'm still mostly not here. This, however, might be relevant.

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=004PTN

Dustin,

Actually your home address doesn't need to be disclosed for the Print-Trade program, since you could simply e-mail it to the person that's sending you the prints.

Ricardo

I love it. As Jeremy mentions, it might be just the thing to bring subscribers into Photo.net (myself included) - and it might turn Photo.net back into a community, something I had hoped the circles would accomplish.

Ditto on the inkjet prints as well - I print from my Stylus Photo 820.

Only one thing: please let's not do a "most traded pictures" or anything of the sort.

I'm afraid I'll be a bit busy the next two weeks, so it is unlikely I'll be around Photo.net much. If the discussion is going to be moved to another thread to request new circle members, please let me know so I can keep track when I come back.

Take care,

So, here's my offer.

I can set up a site that will allow people to log in and have different forums, which we can use for the circles. People would then post URLs to their Photo.net critique requests there, and others on the circle would follow them and comment. I think I can even enable e-mail alerts for people on the circle for when there is a new post, though I'm not sure.

After a while, we just shuffle circle membership.

This will of course require some work, and as Marc points out the best approach would be to keep EVERYTHING inside Photo.net. I had offered as a volunteer back in October (I think it was either late September or early October) but never got a response. The offer still stands: even if I now have less spare time to spend developing, I can always manage a circle; and I'm sure any of those who keep posting here would also jump at the opportunity to hhelp there.

What I mean, in a roundabout way, is that if Photo.net is going to implement the circles as something more dynamic and user-administrated, great. If not, I'd love it if somebody from Photo.net posted on this thread so that I knew where we stand.

Cheers,

A suggestion, don't know if this might be overkill.

I'm testing PHPNuke. Combined with Gallery and installing both on my site, I think I can give people a way to add images and comments to these - sort as a mini micro tiny Photo.net, created just for the purpose of the circles.

More details tomorrow or Monday as I finish testing.

Carl,

I agree with you on most counts, except on uploading several images a week. Actually, I think that keeping postings per user to one or two a week can help focus the discussions, and foster more discussions on those images that have been uploaded.

Give me some time, and maybe by monday I can have an independent message board set up on my site that we can use for the critique group.

Reina,

It is possible that I'm not aware of all the tools that Photo.net provides. It is also possible that I'm too much of a software developer to think outside writing a new piece of code. I'd love to hear your suggestion as to how to set up photo critique circles here without intervention of an admin. Or do you mean managing things largely off-site?

Later today I'll try and post a question on the circle you mention about their experience, I'd like to know how they're doing. In our case, I believe that it was a lack of commitment: some people were probably interested only in posting an image or two and seeing what happened, while others hung in the sidelines for months. We had the prolific David Vatovec, who posts quite often, Mauricio José Schwarz, myself and some posts by Ellery Chua. Most other posted maybe an image or two.

How does this affect the ones who do post? Well, after a while most critiques I got from the circle were from Mauricio and David; David got critiques from Mauricio and me; etc. It defeats the purpose of the multiple possible points of view if you always get the same two, and this discourages the people who were posting.

I myself dropped out about a month ago - I've been too busy with my work to take the time and create something new, just to have it largely ignored (yes, I'd rather have a somebody post a scathing oh-dear-lord-what-terrible-composition or I'm-tired-of-this-same-kind-of-crap message than have an image ignored).

I promise not to go into a "has Photo.net's growth hurt it" thread. Stopping here,

Ricardo

Reina,

As far as I know, nobody can start their own circles within Photo.net. I actually suggested that the admins in Photo.net relieve themselves of this work by empowering some people within each circle to accept new members, but so far I've received no response to that.

Sure, you can contact some people and notify each other when you upload a new photo, thus improvising your own circle. You would, however, lose what I believe is the tool from the circle that makes a difference: the filtered view of the Photo critique requests.

Hi,

Next week I'm going to be photographing a friend and his 3-4 week old

baby. Since he's extremely young, I think I'd rather not use a flash

and concentrate on window light. Any other suggestions you want to

make are welcome.

Thanks in advance,

Thanks for the answers. I was actually not as hard on the photo as other people and was considering between rating it as a 3/3 or 4/2 (since the aesthetics are not to my taste), but was surprised when I only had 3-6 to chose from.

>Somebody rating a POW so low is probably expressing their

>negative opinion of its choice as POW rather than an objective

>opinion of the photo itself.

But difficulting this would assume that people can't objectively rate at all, so you would have to lump everybody under the same criteria and don't discriminate against those that want to rate it low. As you suggest, not being able to rate it at all would be a better choice than to just skew the ratings (since somebody might honestly not like the image).

I think I just ran into a technical issue. I was trying to rate an

image which I had already commented on (twice, actually), the Photo

of the Week, and I'm not being allowed to rate it below 3; as if I

hadn't commented on it.

Hi Tom,

I usually size my images to (at their longest) 800x600 - this makes the file small and keeps the image viewable even at the Large size. I try not to go below 75% compression with JPEG, since more often than not detail is lost.

As for borders, it's a matter of taste. I've started using them recently on some images, but more often than not I just drop a slight shadow around the photo. Just go with what you're comfortable with.

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with a Canon 100-300 4.5/5.6 USM: the focus is stuck

at infinite and I can't rotate it, neither manually with the ring nor

when attempting autofocus on the body. I plan to take it to the

service center on Monday but meanwhile: any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Rob,

I'm doing exactly that: working mostly with T-Max and Tri-X, scanning them on a Polaroid Sprintscan 35 Plus and printing 8x10s out on a Stylus Photo 820. I like the end results a lot, but be warned: I'm no pro and have no access to a real darkroom. Doing it this way enables me to control the printing process, instead of just trusting somebody else with the printing, and allows me to digitally burn or dodge certain areas that the lab would print "as is" (it is a good lab, but even so it is sometimes easier just to do things yourself).

Good thing I asked about the 409 before using it. Thanks again, Mark.

Now, a small anecdote about Epson Technical Support. Since my Stylus Photo 820 was only a month old, I decided to take it to their Service Center - which happens to be about 1km from here - so that they could check if there was something wrong with the printing heads. Being a pessimist about customer service I expected evasives, denial and finally having to leave the printer there so that they could take two weeks to examine it.

The guy at the Epson shop was pretty straightforward. He explained that the first cartridges are often lost to cleaning the printing heads, and that things should be normal after these. He ran he cleaning cycle a couple of times, didn't give me time to complain about having to use ink as a cleaning supply and threw my cartridges away, slapped some new ones on, gave me the printer and told me to go back it the problem persisted with these new ones.

Overall, a great customer service experience. Can't tell if it will translate to your local service center, but Epson managed to secure me as a happy customer by simply taking care of the problem.

PS: I'll drop a note here if I do try the Windex later on, Scott.

Justin,

What image size are you working with? I'm surprised that it takes a while to save, they must be pretty heavy. It could also be a CPU issue, but since you have so much RAM I assume your computer must be fairly up to date.

I won't repeat Scott's points about usability or support, they're all right on. The rather uneven support for LZW-compressed Tiffs (the Windows explorer can't display them as thumbnails, for example, and some image processing programs have trouble with them) is probably due to the LZW patent issue. PNG is fully open-source and doesn't depend on any patents, so any fairly recent (less than 4 or 5 years old) program is sure to understand them.

I personally favor PNG over Tiff. On my tests, PNG images are smaller than Tiff (even when using LZW compression), and I've never had any major speed problems. For me, the space-time ratio is well worth it, since I can burn more images into a CD when I'm backing them up or transporting them.

For final images (images I'm going to print or upload or backup or whatever) I go with PNG, using Gimp's XCF file format when I'm working on something.

Thanks for the comments and pointers.

<p><I>Emre</I>: Your recipe sounds like a good way to trim the photos out of any fat whatsoever. Thanks for bringing to my attention (and the thread) the need to sometimes do just that.

<p><I>John</I>: Actually, I try to do just that - specially in cases such as this one, where the subject was important to me and the environment rather unfriendly. The image I presented as a sample was the last frame of a roll shot during an hour.

<p><I>Joe</I>: You do have a point, which I'll keep in mind. While in the case of this photo the foreign elements don't add a lot, in the future I'll try not to remove anything that gives the image context.

<p>This is, by the way, <A HREF="http://www.photo.net/photo/1061088">the crop I decided to go with</A> in the end. The father liked it a lot, since it focused tightly on them both.

<p>Once again, thanks. This discussion has been most educational.

Hi,

I'm having a persistent issue with the nozzles on my Stylus Photo

820. Even though it gets used often, the nozzles for the black and

darker blue inks keep getting clogged - and the darker blue is really hard to unclog, even with the nozzle cleaning utility. Any

suggestions from other Epson users to avoid this?

Thanks in advance,