SummitPost.org

Bob Sihler wrote: ... and pictures of semi-tame "wild" animals that some members pathetically fall all over each other for in their mad rush to vote and lavish praise.

+ 10,000

There's a difference between a full-fledged mountain goat and somebody's dog, cat, or Guinea Pig. Please .... keep the latter on Facebook or your personal website .....

Not only did you vote 10/10 for the photo, but you posted a positive comment under it thus drawing even more attention to it in the first place!

lcarreau wrote:

Bob Sihler wrote: ... and pictures of semi-tame "wild" animals that some members pathetically fall all over each other for in their mad rush to vote and lavish praise.

+ 10,000

There's a difference between a full-fledged mountain goat and somebody's dog, cat, or Guinea Pig. Please .... keep the latter on Facebook or your personal website .....

I'm not even talking about that, Larry. I'm talking about the "wildlife" photos of animals that are anything but wild. Outside a zoo, no one except somebody with a ridiculously expensive telephoto lens can get anywhere close to raptors, wolves, bears, etc.

Example? Let's use my own.


That is a scan of a film shot with a 300 mm lens and a 2X extender. That osprey was used to people being within throwing distance; no other osprey has ever let me get that close.

It's all a joke, Larry. SP members are more likely to vote a beach sunset by a well-known member for POTD than a photo with a diagram of the route.

And you're guilty because you vote 10 and make comments on just about anything.

This thread is getting good!

Bob Sihler wrote:I'm not even talking about that, Larry. I'm talking about the "wildlife" photos of animals that are anything but wild. Outside a zoo, no one except somebody with a ridiculously expensive telephoto lens can get anywhere close to raptors, wolves, bears, etc.

Example? Let's use my own.

That is a scan of a film shot with a 300 mm lens and a 2X extender. That osprey was used to people being within throwing distance; no other osprey has ever let me get that close.

It's all a joke, Larry. SP members are more likely to vote a beach sunset by a well-known member for POTD than a photo with a diagram of the route.

And you're guilty because you vote 10 and make comments on just about anything.

Hoooeee, Bob, you're going to be one grumpy dude by the time you get to be my age! But back in 2006, you were in a much sunnier frame of mind about that picture. "Thank you!" our Bob exclaimed, when complimented on his fine shot. "They're not easy to approach, and they have this curious habit of turning from the camera when you do get close." And now those poor people who voted for your photo are just a joke?

All you puritans are set to stamp out pretty photos. Nope, nothing but route diagrams on our front page! Can't we just relax and let the photo people be?

A brand new member submitted their first photo today.

But he did it at 11:32 am. Poor fella never stood a chance.

Bah you anti-photoshop puritans. If you don't want to see an altered reality, the only way is to go outside and see for yourself. If you look at photos on the internet, you are going to have to accept that there is some distortion: the camera that took the image already gives a different image than what your eye sees, since humans simply do not have ccd's in their eye sockets. Then, depending on the monitor you display it on you get another round of distortion from the true colors and brightnesses that your eye would have experienced.

Digital cameras are particularly notorious for their low dynamic range. If there are many different levels of brightness in a scene, your eye picks them all up just fine, but your camera will truncate quite heavily above and below. I'm often quite dissapointed when I come home and see the pictures the first time on my screen: "that's not what it looked like at all!". So the pure camera image is actually quite terrible at representing the actual scene. Only accepting those versions since they are 'not-photoshopped' is just selecting one particular
(inaccurate) digital representation of a scene over another. Using photoshop to bring out the colors and various brightness levels can in many cases actually make the photo more realistic.

So I propose the opposite. We no longer accept pictures from crappy cameras which have not been enhanced by photoshop, since they do not give an accurate representation of reality

In all seriousness, there's nothing wrong in playing with photoshop to get the picture to look a little better. Take the picture Josh quoted, it looks beautiful, it was undoubtely a beautiful scene and I can really feel the atmosphere. It's a good photo. But sometimes it can be overdone, look too colorful, too much messed with, etc. (like the one quoted immediately afterwards, in my opinion), and you don't like it, well in this case you simply vote it down (or if there are animals which have been photoshopped in, argh).

Chugach, thank you. I just did what I should have long ago-- deleted that picture from the Everglades that I uploaded to SummitPost. It was for the animal close-ups album, which I thought was a cool idea at the time but later changed my mind about. Now I will lose some Power Points. Oh my.

And here in lies the problem Matt. You have to let go. You really do, of all this voting stuff. Every one has a different opinion. So many still just want landscapes, they just want what they consider to be better landscapes....then you have folks worried about photoshopped images...then you have wildlife enthusiasts.....and finally some lowly climbers like myself....MAKE IT RANDOM, END OF STORY.....set it up to rotate quickly, thus no image lasts long anyway....do that for all photos, no POTD therefore eliminating the games all together=credibility as a web site....if you feel you need a filter, allow a (and not anonymous) negative vote or two to take a stupid photo out of the eligibility....same for beta pages.....I had not submitted a photo outside of a beta page for years....so out of curiosity submitted this photo my wife took of me climbing in Jtree this past week....will let you go back and look at yesterday, I havn't, but can assure you it or any climbing photo like it would never get close via a voting system to get exposed on SP....climbers do not have the same time as photographers do, nor care about games.....a photo like this will still never make it to your front page if dependant on some vote system, no matter how you construe it..not even close.....it has no photographer quality obviously, but last time I checked, this is not a photography site....we will never see climbing photos, ice, rock, hard alpine.....unless you make it random...climbers run with small cheap cameras in remote places.....if someone submits a photo of a dog sitting in his yard, any two members could down vote it and take it down to some threshold to where it gets booted out of the random selection process. Random is the key Matt, to all of it. Fair, balanced, interesting...never know what you are going to see.

keep in mind Matt, changes I am proposing are not about appeasing current membership (good luck with that), but rather about attracting new interest in the site...if I am involved....my main objective

Dow Williams wrote:" ...Fair, balanced, interesting...never know what you are going to see.]

Hmmm, sounds a lot like Fox News ....

mrchad9 wrote:A brand new member submitted their first photo today.

But he did it at 11:32 am. Poor fella never stood a chance.

Nice picture. Interresting that the post about photoshopping follows it, since this photo could really use an increase in contrast (and maybe a bit more saturation).

Curious. My belief is that route pages (or mountain pages that contain routes) should give preference to photos that are informative, versus those that are pretty. Often one must shoot into the sun a bit, and there is no room to maneuver around to improve the picture. Maybe the weather is dismal and gray that day, so the sky is ugly, but the rock actually stands out better.

In this picture, I purposely made a pinnacle pink (and said so in the route description), so people could pick it out of the background. I hope that's not a violation of good taste.
http://www.summitpost.org/dt-from-ne-zoom/196012

When we are in the mountains, we can move our heads back and forth, step a few feet side to side, and that motion increases the contrast of a route hugely, because we use our brains and eyes to detect the movement of edges. We don't have that option with a single photo.

I have never used photoshop, but use a simple bitmap editor.

MoapaPk wrote:In this picture, I purposely made a pinnacle pink (and said so in the route description), so people could pick it out of the background. I hope that's not a violation of good taste.
http://www.summitpost.org/dt-from-ne-zoom/196012

An excellent reason to alter an image on a site like this one!

Dow, under discussion recently has been an idea to introduce more randomization and variety to pictures on the front page. It may not drive a stake through the heart of the photo games, but it should vastly improve things. This change will be one of the first after the migration to the new server.