Nag, Nag, Nag

[billtils]

It's been a while since I posted or commented and every time I log on I get a nagging reminder message. I give in ... these are all a year old so old and either haven't been posted here before or are re-worked.


1: Night racing. A shot from a Hill Climb a year ago. The event was fun (if you like that sort of thing) but not very interesting from a photographic point of view. I reworked this one to make it look like a night shot.




2: From the garden. This is a bunch of vegetables freshly picked by our daughter from her garden in Western Australia. We were all packed and about to leave for the airport and the journey home, but the colours caught my attention. It has a black background because they were on the kitchen work top which is black ...





3: In the woodland. From a hide when photgraphing squirrels when this chaffinch decided to have lunch on nut crumbs left by the squirrels.




4: Cooling off. One of the squirrels. I posted a similar shot earlier, but liked this one enough to give it an airing.

[Wavelength]

I really like the vegetables, the bird and the squirrel.

[Manfred M]

Nice ones Bill. I particularly like your first one of the car doing the hill climb. The food one does not quite do it for me as all of the food seems to be suspended in mid-air from a visual standpoint. Birds and squirrels are very, very common where I live, so most people here don't get too excited by those types of images, although we do get the occasional surprise. That being said, these are nicely done.

Given the lockdown periods we've had for the past 10 months or so, getting out and shooting has been challenging. Last spring, the authorities were issuing fines for people, including photographers, who stopped in any public areas including some of the parks with good photography potential. We are again in a period similar to this, so all of my favourite winter shooting spots are off limits. I do hope that there will be some reopening in February, because I do have a few projects that are on hold that require ice and snow..

The studio I shoot at has also been shut for most of the past year, so my "home studio" has seen some work. But I have spend a lot of time updating older images with my vastly improved post-processing skills.

[billtils]

Thanks for the feedback Manfred - and a belated Happy New Year to you and yours.

I agree with what you say about the vegetables but as the saying goes, it is what it is, namely some colourful fruit on a black background shot with no time to re-arrange.

A comment about "... Birds and squirrels are very, very common ..." I had a bit of a bite your tongue moment recently when the judge in the Club "Wildlife" themed competition marked one of mine down on the grounds that he knows the location where it was shot and the photograph didn't stand out so strongly for him as it would have for a judge from a different location. It cost me the silverware but I kept reminding myself of the third law of photography competitions "The Judge is always right espeically when they are wrong".

[Manfred M]

Thanks for the feedback Manfred - and a belated Happy New Year to you and yours.

I agree with what you say about the vegetables but as the saying goes, it is what it is, namely some colourful fruit on a black background shot with no time to re-arrange.

A comment about "... Birds and squirrels are very, very common ..." I had a bit of a bite your tongue moment recently when the judge in the Club "Wildlife" themed competition marked one of mine down on the grounds that he knows the location where it was shot and the photograph didn't stand out so strongly for him as it would have for a judge from a different location. It cost me the silverware but I kept reminding myself of the third law of photography competitions "The Judge is always right especially when they are wrong".

A belated Happy New Year to you and yours as well!

No problem Bill, but the one thing one hears quite often from judges is to "show me something new and original". That is rather challenging, especially at the time of COVID-19. I have also been penalized for showing local scenes that everyone has photographed; areas that every visitor to the area will photograph. If they are photographers and enter these images in a competition, at home, they will get higher scores than they would have had they photographed a local landmark.

Part of this is systemic, as marks are given for emotional impact. In the system that is commonly used in club competitions in Canada, the judging criteria for scores of 8, 9 and 10 are similar. They all state that the image should have no significant technical or compositional issues and a score of 8 is given if there is good emotional impact, 9 has excellent impact and 10 has outstanding impact. Unfortunately, if a judge has good knowledge of the place or subject, that impact score won't be as high.

The problem is that impact is very personal; I've had recent images that scored 10 by one judge and 7.5 by another. So, while this type of result does happen, it is unfortunately a bias that has been built in to the system.

[escape]

The first image also looked suspended to me. I'm not crazy about the shadow in front of the bird, but I do like the squirrel picture. I particularly like the setting and the colors of its fur. The squirrels in my neck of the woods are either gray or black, not two-tone. Nice capture.

[billtils]

Thanks Daniel

We are fortunate in the part of Scotland where I live in that we have a thriving population of red squirrels, indeed I have never seen a grey here.