markci

Yes, Samuel, that's what we've been telling you all along. It means TO ARRIVE AT. Not to strive for or try to achieve without actually succeeding. Therefore, you used it incorrectly. Why are you having a hard time admitting this when your own dictionary agrees with us?

 

 

The Toyota 4Runner is EPA rated at 16/19 miles per gallon highway/city, which is pretty typical for a "six-banger" midsize SUV. The Ford Expedition is rated at 15/20 with the 4.6L V8, or 13/18 with the 5.4L V8. The full-size Chevies are similar. I can't find official EPA figures on the worst offender, the V10 Excursion, but estimates are usually around 12 mpg. So in a world where some vehicles get well over 50 mpg, the threshold between "Don't sweat it" and criminal assault is what, somewhere between 16 and 12 mpg city?

Congratulations, by the way. Right-wingers like to caricature environmentalists as:

1) Self-righteous.

2) Acting on emotion rather than facts.

3) Nutty

4) Likely to engage in criminal activity.

I'd say you're batting 4 for 4 in this thread. I'm not sure you could have done more to discredit environmentalism if you were Rush Limbaugh posting incognito. A great job of environmental "education."

The background could be less ugly & distracting. Panning might help, and maybe shooting from another position.

You *seriously* need to tone down the color saturation on this!

Not bad. I have a couple of suggestions for improvement. One is to watch your background: this one's pretty bright a draws attention away from the subject. Another is to get down on the same level as your subject, which will create more a sense of intimacy.

You need better light.

Very nice. I particularly like the "brute" on the upper kid's head protection.

It could be worse. Imagine having a long ride in his cab.

Oh, God no!!! As much as I like San Francisco, I think I'll steer clear for a while.

I think it's a shame that someone would suggest we all ignore Mr. Shuler. What good would that do? Does anyone really see any harm in his opinions? Or are you just annoyed by the fact that he not only has strong opinions about photography but is both willing and able to present them quite clearly - if not exactly concisely.

I don't see any harm in his opinions: I'm just utterly bored by them. Tris is like the clod at the cocktail party who monopolizes the conversation, droning on endlessly and sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Is he right or wrong? Who knows, and who cares: most of us stopped paying attention a long time ago.

Ignoring him may work, or it may not. Bores are usually deaf to social cues, and too enchanted with the sounds of their own voices to stop anyway.

As for the photo, something's not quite right. The shoe flying is obviously meant to imply action, but the stiff & symmetrical position of the limbs looks very static and posed. I think you need to make up your mind and go one way or the other with it.

Sorry, but it looks like someone doing something because it was easy in photoshop. I don't see the point.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with a couple of Jenny's points, or at least suggest a different way to go.

 

I sort of like that the kid is running out of the frame. Giving her "room to run" inside the frame is conventional textbook advice that works to create a conventional image, but sometimes you need to break the rules. Having the subject near the edge or moving toward the edge adds tension and gives the photo a, well, edgy feel.

 

Your background is hurting you here, though: visually, it's very difficult to separate the figure from the background. One solution might be to go the opposite way with shutter speed: use a slower one and pan the camera with the subject to blur the background and create a feeling of motion.

Beyond what is necessary to be able to appreciate art, all that is necessary to be able to criticize art validly is intelligence, perceptiveness, analytical skill, honesty, and a good ability to articulate oneself. Not experience as a photographer.

The problem with that statement is that so few of the general population meet those criteria, particularly where it comes to the ability to appreciate art and visual perceptiveness. Owning a Nikon and knowing how to operate it don't automatically grant you this capacity, but successful photographers (and visual artists of all types) almost by definition must have either been born with or developed a high degree of visual awareness.

You can call me an elitist for saying that the average person's artistic sensibilities are for shit, but it's hard to come to any other conclusion when I look at the prefab bubblegum pop acts that rake in 90% of the money spent on music, when I go into the frame shop in the mall and see the crap people are actually hanging on their walls, when I drive into a new subdivision full of architectural mostrosities, et cetera ad nauseam.

The originality rating is stupid. 99% of the people commenting don't know enough about the history of photography to know what's been done, so they wouldn't recognize something original. 99% of the posts aren't even technically competent, let alone original works of art. Even the greatest artists usually only have one truly original idea in their lifetimes and spend the rest of it either perfecting that or casting around looking for the next big idea that never comes.

Wow. Who says you need AF to get good flight shots? Well done.

Sort of reminds me of Coffin Rock in the Blair Witch Project.

First of all, it almost certainly wasn't Philip who chose the image.

 

Second, I don't think there's anything political about the explanation for why it was chosen. Are you suggesting people who lost friends or relatives in the war aren't entitled to be haunted by it?

 

Third, the participle of "to die" is spelt "dying," unless Mr. Dilworth is suggesting they were manufacturing coins

or something over there.

 

Fourth, I think it's a nice photo. It's not spectacular, and certainly not one of those that make me wish I were only capable of creating such an image, but as a photo of that particular subject matter, I'm not sure how it could have been done better.

 

Finally, as to the wall itself, I'm not sure every monument has to tell the whole story. Should we paste a big disclaimer on the side of the Washington Monument or Jefferson Memorial pointing out their well-documented personal shortcomings? It reminds me of those insufferable people who, when the price of any large project is brought up, say "well I can't believe we spent X on Y when there are starving children in the world." Yes, we know there are larger and more important issues that offend your highly tuned sensibilities, but that doesn't make our admittedly insignificant ones any smaller.

 

Finally (this time for real), I think the design of the monument (black, recessed into the ground and very controversial when it was first designed, by the way) reflects a lot of moral ambiguity on the part of most Americans toward what our government was doing in this war.

Once again, Samuel refuses to admit his mistake. Attain to means to achieve. Period. No dictionary or "authoritative text" has ever said otherwise, and you can't cite a single one. Anyone you've heard using it that way is simply wrong.

 

So correcting his spelling was a joke? A word of advice: don't quite your day job for a career as a comedian.

 

 

The text on the wall is not backwards. I can clearly read several names.

The more I see of Photonet, the more discouraged I become about photography in general and photographers in particular.

Gee, Samuel, I'd hate to see you get discouraged, so on behalf of pretty much the entire readership, I'd like suggest you take a photo.net vacation. Perhaps a permanent one. Please.

The "perfect picture" is out there, but Ive never seen it yet. Thats what we attain to.

The more I see semiliterates who apparently don't know the meaning of the word "attain" correct other people's spelling, the more discouraged I become about British education, and obnoxious Brits in general.

The horizon is a bit off level, but that's fixable. Otherwise it's nice.

It works much better if you crop the second row of posts off the top to simplify.

I don't like that the barn is cut off.

I'm mainly bother by the fact that I can't tell what in the world I'm looking at in the foreground. Some sort of debris? This is one of those near-far shots, and the near part of one of these desperately needs to be interesting.

I don't care for it -- it's way too obvious a fake.

Bill, again my comments were deliberately a bit extreme, trying to mock Carlos' attitude. Sorry if you didn't get that. I'm not crazy about the photo, but that's just me.