mikemorrellNL

I really do value and appreciate all you guys and the mods are doing to prevent and clean up Spam! But my feeling is that there is perhaps more that could be done in terms of 'Honeypots', the complexity of Q&A challenges and 'crowdsourcing' effective 'antispam' plugins (Cleantalk: $12 a year?, Hell, I'd gladly pay this subscription fee for PN myself!)

Fully agree that flagging posts as Spam helps a lot to clean up Spam. Invisioncommunity offers additional spam prevention measures in the Admin Control Panel. Such as Q&A challenges. Not all of these were implemented on Jan 28 (see link to my Jan 28 post below). I'm not sure how many of these have been implemented since then. I also read about the 'Honeypot' approach (a registration form field invisible to humans but not to bots) to distinguishing between legit members and bots. In a recent Invisioncommunity/forum thread, (other) Invisioncommunity admins also report a recent deluge of Spam despite implementing anti-spam measures. One admin (Luke Z) suggested investing $12 a year on a CleanTalk plugin. I don't know it, but it claims to distinguish between spam and legit 'registrations'. It also check IP-addresses against a continually updated database of 'Spam' IP-addresses. Perhaps worth checking out. So while I too continue to flag spam, perhaps there's more admins could do to tighten up our spam prevention measures. Mike

I like the concept of combining 'Ukraine Spring' with bullet/shell casings. But the way the concept is expressed in the photo is a stretch for me too. I personally associate 'Spring' with early flowers (snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils) and the first green buds on shrubs and trees. Maybe there's a way of 'integrating' the bullet/shell casings into an outdoor 'spring scene' or (indoors) into a 'spring basket' which - at least where I live - shops and florists are starting to sell.

I really like this too! Well spotted! A matter of taste but personally, I find the frame a bit 'heavy' (and distracting). A heavy black frame always reminds me of funeral notices 😉. You might want to try a 'lighter, thinner' greyish-white frame. Perhaps a similar color to the ice crystals?

This looks to be a very difficult photo to get a 'balanced exposure' out of the camera. Shooting directly into the sun with deep shadows in the foreground. Given the situation, it looks fine. As @jordan2240 says, waiting a little longer might have made the sunlight less intense. TBH, I have no idea how to take this kind of photo any better than you have have. The only thing that occurs to me is 'exposure bracketing' so that you have multiple exposures to choose from and/or use in post-processing. The main improvement in post-processing that I would suggest is brightening (exposure/curves) the foreground, especially bottom left and right. This would bring out more detail and texture in the foreground.

+1 for @samstevens's comment. That said, I sometimes take photos of interesting sculptures too without noting who the sculptor is/was. This is an interesting sculpture and worth photographing. I'm not sure about the post-processing. For me, the detailed frame competes with - and draws attention away from - the sculpture. The amount of added 'noise' is a matter of taste. You might want to experiment with a finer 'texture'.

Haha, I'll take 'skillfully' as a compliment🙂. The PP challenge threads are of course just for fun. Wikipedia has a good summary of 'photo manipulation' dating back to the earliest days of photography (19th century). Bottom line: you can't really 'trust' any photo to faithfully represent what the photographer was seeing through the viewfinder. For me, 'trust' is more in the photographer or publisher than in the photo. FWIW, I recently saw the 'Theatre of Authenticity' photo exhibition by Natacha de Mahiu. Through skilful photo manipulation (overlaying tens of hundreds of photos of the same tourist destinations) she illustrates how many seek out the same nature spots in search of an 'introspective and authentic experience'. I found it an interesting social comment and innovative application of photo manipulation.

Desert Landscape is CC0 by Dan Gold sourced at negativespace.co

I like this photo - a great location, full of character! I tracked down where it is and the hiking boots don't surprise me 😉. I read that while the Olympus OM-1 standard saturation is 'modest' it tends to 'push' reds more than other colors. Given the high 'red content' of this photo, you could consider a slight desaturation of the reds. I like the 16:9 crop because it makes your friends more 'the subject' of the photo (with the cottage as the background). Another cropping option might be 4:3 and losing a bit of the foreground and the right-hand side of the photo. My guess is that even without the right hand side of the cottage, there would be enough 'cottage left' to express the scene.

Kudos to the admin/mod team! Absolutely no spam in my 'unread content' this morning (European time)! Mike

Someone's up early!😀 When I logged in to PN 30-60 minutes ago, my 'unread content' was full of Spam. It's now all disappeared so my compliments and thanks to mods/admins who have cleaned all this 'spam' up so quickly!😁 I'm sure mods and admins are aware of this, but IMHO much of the so-called 'Spam' we have seen on PN is actually 'Scam'. In other words, not designed (or published) to advertise a legitimate product or service by a legitimate company but simply to lure people into calling a false phone number, sending an e-mail to or visiting a false website. All with the intention of (for example) allowing scammers to deduct ludicrously high phone charges and/or gain access to your personal information e-mail address, IP-address, ...) without your knowledge. Not to mention the risk of installing 'malware' on your computer/phone. At least one of the phone numbers posted in my 'unread content 'spam' (now thankfully removed by mods/admins) was flagged as a 'known scam number' on scammer.info. I don't think for one moment think that any PN member would actually interact with any content in the 'spam' ads. I just want to note that even calling the advertised phone number or e-mailing the advertised e-mail address to complain (or visiting the published website) is risky. Chances are, whatever you motivation for contacting 'scammers' you run the risk of being 'scammed' without even knowing it. OT: wherever you live, it's worthwhile visiting some 'reliable' anti-scam websites (police, government, etc.) to stay abreast of past and current 'scams'. Even being reasonably 'tech savvy' and aware of many 'scam techniques', I did get scammed once a couple of years ago by a so-called 'help-desk' which perfectly emulated my prior (corporate) experience with remote help-desks. A year later, I was amazed at the sophistication of another scam attempt in which 'my daughter' (with her photo) texted me, saying that she had a 'new phone' and number on which the audio wasn't working properly. It took hours for 'her' to ask me for a loan which would help her pay some pressing bills. Something didn't quite ring true (my daughter wouldn't do this) and I didn't fall for it. On a police-run 'anti-spam' website, I later read that this was a common scam through which other parents had lost thousands of dollars. It's sad but 'scammers' are becoming ever more sophisticated. By comparison, the PN 'scams' look primitive, obvious and more a 'blunderbuss' attempt to lure victims rather than individually targeted attempts.

Good to hear! In the Invision Community (Admin) Antispam guidelines, various levels of 'anti-spam' prevention measures are suggested. All are easily (with one click) configurable. I'm glad to hear that the 'Admins/Mods' are now more focused on measures to prevent spam rather than on 'cleaning up' spam that gets through our 'prevention measures'. Once again. I've offered to help out with Spam prevention and removal but as yet I've received no reply.

Dutch Shuffleboard

Think UK english. Wonderful topic!

FWIW, I came across this Shotkit review of AI Photo tools to try in 2023. One of the most interesting for me was 'Aftershoot' which uses AI to help its users 'cull' (and select) photos from a batch. It provisionally rates photos in the batch based on the user's criteria such as blur, open eyes, duplicates, etc. and sorts these into different 'buckets' which the user can then quickly review. The user can at any time manually change the rating of a photo or move photos from one 'bucket' to another. It can be used before importing photos into Lightroom or CaptureOne or - with a bit more prep - be used within these apps. Another interesting development is that users of the web-based and mobile versions of Lightroom can use Adobe's AI Sensei tech to search through photos that are synched to their Adobe cloud storage. So users can for example search their photos in the Adobe cloud based on terms like 'water', beach' or 'red'. At the moment, this AI search only works with photos stored in (synched with) Adobe's cloud storage. I hope that it at some stage also becomes available for 'Lightroom Classic' and for locally stored photos. Ideally, the 'Aftershoot' type of AI tech would become fully integrated in Lightroom. Interesting times ahead! If I live that long 😉. For me personally, manually rating/selecting/culling photos from a photoshoot is (as an amateur) part of the fun. And these days, I rarely take more than than 100-150 shots at any 'photoshoot.' And not very often. But for professional (wedding/sport/...) photographers, I'm sure that these kind of AI apps can really speed up their workflow. What I like is that these AI apps is that they only make 'recommendations' to make final rating/selection/culling easier and less time-consuming The final choice about which photos make the grade is always made by the photographer (or human assistant).

Interesting! Thanks for sharing the article. I think Ryan Stout makes some valid points - at least, given today's 'photography tech' status: - Mobile Phone photography has probably led the way in applying AI in recent years, rather than DSLR/Mirrorless photography - Selecting and perfecting the 'best' photos in post-processing can be a labor-intensive process (though this is changing too) I'm sure that Arsenal 2 tech. appeals to photographers who want to use AI to take 'perfect photos' without the hassle of manually adjusting settings. Arsenal 2 seems to be more sophisticated AI than DSLR 'Full Automatic mode'. But Arsenal 2 might be temporarily 'bridging the AI tech. gap' until similar tech is introduced into newer camera bodies. On the one hand 'in-camera AI' (like Arsenal 2) is becoming ever more sophisticated. At the same time, post-processing apps that use AI technology are becoming ever more sophisticated too. It'll be interesting to see if, how and when these 2 types of AI apps connect.

Hi @LineMartel, I'm a big fan of your work. IHMO, the 'old' PN website was 'broken' and no longer sustainable. The 'new' PN - based on the 'Invision Community' platform - is designed as a 'community'. Primarily as a forum but with some additions for 'sharing' photos between community members. It's not designed to profile photo portfolios or sell photos as previous incarnations of PN might have been. My (humble) suggestion is that you work out which communication channels work best for you. I've seen photographers' websites where they display a relatively small image of their photos and on which download (right-click) options are disabled. On the other hand social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) can often display your photos but not with a high enough resolution to make it worthwhile downloading. In both cases, the message is 'pay x$ for a hi-res file that can be printed' Mike

Just my 2 (or more) cts: The quoted 'condition' is not specifically about photos but applies to 'anything posted by users' (including text) Photo's are posted on PN in two very different forms: - in galleries - as attachments to posts (Notably, but not exclusive to the 'No Words' forum) Members can always delete photos from a public or private gallery. In principle, these photos should then disappear forever on PN. However, if a member attaches a photo to a post (with an 'edit limit' of 15 minutes) then their post - including attached photos - are in principle 'preserved for posterity'. In other words, InvisionCommunity (in this case PN) reserves the right to retain posts - possibly with attached - photos indefinitely. Like @Sandy Vongries, I'm far from being a legal expert. But I can well imagine a lawyer amending a standard 'blanket text' that protects the legal rights of the 'community provider' to retain anything posted in a community indefinitely. Without this 'protection', things could IMHO sometimes become chaotic and unmanageable. For example in cases where a disgruntled forum member requests ( or demands) that: - all or specific his/her (new) posts - and the responses to these be deleted - all of his/her responses to threads initiated by other members be deleted - etc. It seems to me to be pretty much impossible to 'unthread' a member on all forums on his/her request. So I quite understand the 'legal protection' that whatever you post 'can be retained and displayed indefinitely'. Mike

This may be a very dozy and uniformed comment but web browsers (I use Google) enable users to: a) open images (in new tabs) in the size/resolution in which they have been posted b) save images to a PC for further inspection, for example in PhotoShop, other image post-processing, or Exif data analysis tools. Yes there are 'photo sites' that prevent downloads of photos. I suspect that this type of 'download prevention' is a customized option on individual websites. I may well be wrong!

Just a reminder to @SiteHelp that I'm up for supporting the current PN mods. I sent a positive response to a PM from @SiteHelp more than a week ago and I've had as yet no reply.

Hi @satya_v_rao, I personally really like this 'road trip' photo! In the same way that scenes from 'road trip' movies are not always sharp and just give a sense of the 'road trip'. I am aware that - especially on this forum - if (for example) individual 'stills' from movies were (anonymously) selected, they would be 'assessed' as individual photos. So I see your photo as just one 'still' from your road trip. From this photo (and your other photos), I think you have a good 'eye' for photogenic locations and scenes. I think it's great that you contribute to the 'Critique Forum'! As others have said, it's very difficult to take a 'good' photo through the windscreen of a moving auto. Sure, I do it too as do many others. They're important to us as a 'reminder' of where we've been on our travels. They're usually not our 'best' photos in terms of things like sharpness, composition, etc. Things like the windscreen, movement and being in the auto get in the way 😉. Focusing through glass is difficult at the best of times! So please don't stop taking photos in your auto! Just be aware that these might not turn out to be your 'best' photos (whatever the 'content' of the photo might be). But they will be absolutely fine as a 'reminder' of your travels! I'm not sure whether it was legal or safe for you to stop on the '(hard) shoulder' where you took the shot. Probably not. But maybe there was a gas pump or exit nearby, where you could have briefly stopped, got out of the car and got the shot you wanted. Without a windscreen in front of the camera and without movement. My 2 cts: Don't sweat it. This photo is a wonderful reminder of this magnificent scenery and your travels. Is it a 'PN masterpiece'? No, for the reasons I and others have given (a quick snapshot through a windscreen in a moving auto). I'm not sure whether this helps or hinders you but an eye-opener for me some years ago was that it's not the (interesting) 'content' that makes a 'good' photograph, but the 'attention' that the photograph pays in 'creating' the photograph (out of the 'content'). So in this case, stopping your auto somewhere, composing (any) photo with the mountains in the background and taking the time to 'create' one or more 'interesting' photos would IMHO have deliver you better quality photos than the ones shot through the windscreen of a moving auto. But photos shot through the windscreen of a moving auto can be 'interesting' too! Mike

Welcome to Photo.net! Mike