greenslime89

This was kind of a low statement to make. It would be the same as if I came in and said "If this doesn't tell America that everyone needs to start carrying a gun for protection, nothing will. I don't want to start a debate and if you disagree and want to respond to me you have to go to another thread." That would irritate you if I said that just as your comment was kind of irritating to people that don't agree with it. If you want to make comments like that just post it on the thread you linked to in the first place. Well, I thought it an appropriate statement considering the frequency of the two shootings in the last week. I didn't want to start a debate but I thought it best to put that statement here with my thoughts. I didn't want to discuss whether or not a gun ban would reduce crime, just that America should take these shootings on board and do something about it. Why would you be ashamed about something some person on the other side of the world did? You didn't do it. Why should you bear guilt? I like to think that we are all together as a giant community. And we must be the only species on Earth that kill each other for the sake of killing. Not for food, not for space, just to kill. I hate to think that I'm part of the same species as those murderers. I hate to be even remotely related to these people. But I am. We are all human, we should be able to live together peacefully. We say we are civilised, but at times like these I think the animal kingdom is more civilised than us. That's just how I feel.

The frequency of these shootings is sickening. This shooting coming only days after the Virginia Tech shooting. If this doesn't tell America they need to outlaw guns, nothing will. I don't want to start a gun debate here so if you want to discuss an hypothetical gun ban post on Guns: will a ban reduce crime? It's another horrific crime, involving a man gunning down a colleague in an act of madness. Sometimes I'm ashamed to be part of the human race.

I don't think anything's certain. Though I'm guessing the panoramic theme is going ahead.

You're blaming this on the US because they allow their citizens to have guns? Guns are the problem, they should only be issued to those who actually need it. Farmers, police and the armed services for example. Guns are weapons, not a commodity for civilians.

This is another sickening event caused by the lack of respect to guns. America's government had a meeting after the last shooting but no action was taken as a result. Don't they realise that guns are dangerous? They must be treated with respect, but the guns are so readily available that it would seem they are like toys rather than lethal weapons. My heart goes out to the families of the dead and my thoughts will be with the injured students. I just think that guns should be demonised rather than put into toy form for young children to play with. The children would see the guns as what they are, not as play things. This is just another unfortunate rampage in the line of many tragedies. I would just like to understand why the gunman chose to go on this rampage. I just don't see why he thought the whole idea worth his life. Many of the gunmen who go on such killing sprees are shot by police marksmen. So why do it? It just doesn't make sense. Out of curiousity if nothing else, I'd like to know what goes through the minds of such individuals. My guess is that they were depressed and suicidal, and then, with their last minutes, they take as many innocent lives as possible before they are killed. I wonder if there would be such an outcry if a gunman went into high security prison and killed the prisoners though. Once again, I want to express my sympathy to the families of the dead. EDIT: You're absolutely right Bubsa, I have to agree with you on this. This truely is a tragedy to lose so many promising people in one man's final, and particularly brutal, act. The thing that I find the worst is, that the government met, talked and then did nothing to stop the sickening gun crime. This has happened time and time again, until a compotent leader is ready to take action on the growing problem with gun violence.

My first post is gone and good riddance. I was asking what made membership fun for them. I believe someone put a link to the RuneScape page with membership benefits on it :oops:

I didn't know anything about this rule, I've looked into it but I'm not sure about what it means. I take its an exposure rule for selecting aperture and shutter speed with regards to the sensitivity of the film or the CCD? I'm not too sure on this one, if you could explain it to me I'd really appreciate it. I normally just meter it with my camera and then set it into manual and set the shutter speed to roughly the same speed and keep the aperture or change the aperture for a creative shutter speed. I always try to review my photos after I've taken it and if I've made a big mistake with the exposure then I redo it. Exposure compensation is great when your shooting where you can't afford to make mistakes. If I have no time to change the exposure I'll crank up the ISO to 400-800 and set the aperture to about F/8.0 so that way, I'll get my photo exposed fairly well and a fair amount of the shot in focus. What is it you're shooting with? If I remember correctly, you used to use a film camera for a while. Off-topic: Do you want your photos removed from my gallery, I added them and sent a private message to you asking if it was okay for your photos to be shown but you obviously weren't on the forums. The site gets almost zero traffic (exept for a few spam bots advertising viagra :shock: ) So if you want your photos removed just say so and they'll be gone.

I guess that would work, but you'd be taking loads of those as it would be hard to master the smooth arc unless you had it on a tripod, and even that would be really tricky. If you don't have a mirror lock up function, you could try the blue-peter worthy method. Take some selotape and tape the shutter release down while in bulb mode. Those people with Creative Compact cameras would need an ND filter to keep the image at the correct exposure. If only a few people were going to try the hour long exposures, it would probably be better to get people to do a different theme and those wanting to do the long long exposures could do it for pleasure and not competition.

My post has been edited with my critique :wink:

Oh that would be pretty good. I suggest star trails. Go somewhere in the country with little light pollution and set your tripod up and then lock the mirror up and go to bed. Set the alarm way before the sun comes up. Then get up and unlock the mirror and enjoy your star trails. The canon way to do it is to go to the options, then custom functions then find the one that says mirror lockup and set that to setting one. Go to manual exposure mode, set it to bulb and then press the shutter release and it should stay locked up 'till you press it again. If that doesn't work for canon users, consult your user manual.

Welcome back, I'll edit this post with critiques when I'm back from golf. I'm gonna be on for about 4pm BST. I'm trying to get a 400mm F 5.6 lens from ebay at that time. They all look very good though. I'll tell you how you could have made the snow photos better when I edit. Edit: The first one is fantastic. It was a split second shot, prefect timing on your part. Flawless The second one:Another excellent shot. The subject is nicely lit but could have been improved by removing the edge of the leaf below it either physically or digitally. I'm being really picky here as there is little to improve. It's strikingly similar to one of your other ones from a while back though. Try to step out your comfort zone for some new and exciting photo opportunities. The third one is pretty good, but it could be improved by using a quicker shutter speed as the highlights in the clouds have been burnt out. Straightening the image to divide it into three equal parts - water, trees and sky. This would work for this shot. I just don't really find the composition is working here. The fourth one needs a faster shutter speed or the sky to be cropped out. A wider aperture could have made the main tree stand out from the other trees, but you would have needed a faster shutter speed to keep the same exposure. Definately avoid overexposed skies. The fifth is your signature flower shot. I can't say anything else to that. The sixth is snow I think, you should have used a slower shutter speed to stop the camera recording it as a dull grey, but I like the misty, dramatic feel to the shot. The critique for the seventh is basically the same as the sixth. The eighth needs a more flattering composition. The building needs to be seen from an angle rather straight on. It's just too boring straight on. Try the rule of thirds for dividing the sky, subject and the foreground. The burnt out clouds in the ninth works and the strong blue sky is fantastic. Try cloning out that tree in the left hand corner though? I like the feel of movement in this shot. I take it's been manipulated? The tenth is a nice shot, but it's got too much in it I think, the knee (I think) at the right hand side of the shot is slightly distracting so I think it should be removed. A more sympathetic crop would have been beneficial to include the whole hand. I hope that helped. I think critisism is more helpful than just saying they're all good. That's why I did this, not because I don't like them. They are all good, but could be improved.

Breaking my heel has to be top of my list. I used to do gymnastics and I was doing handsprings over a vault - the coach standing at the vault to catch me if I messed up. She then moved the mat to another area, forgetting I was using it. I then started the run up... hit the springboard hands on the vault... "Oh, Ross, I'm so sorry!" I was then thinking about why she could have been sorry. Then, as I hit the wooden floor, I realised. I got a shooting pain up my leg to just above my knee and collapsed on the spot. I then was draggged to a bench where the coach checked my feet over. When my dad arrived to pick me up, she mentioned the accident but said that I seemed to be okay, just a little shaken. My dad took me to hospital and after a long, not to mention boring, wait, I was taken to x-ray and an hour or so later was told I had a broken heel. A woman plastered me up and sent me home with crutches. The next night, the plaster began to tighten, as it's supposed to. But the woman who put on the plaster hadn't taken account for that, so a call to NHS 24 and a trip to A & E saw the plaster cut open and a new one applied. After 2-3 months, the plaster was taken off and physio began. That was incredibly painful, I thought as the plaster was taken off, I could walk normally as I did before. So I jumped of the bed and as my feet hit the ground I had another terrible pain up in my heel and I realised it would take a little longer for it to be alot better. So I walked out of physio with two crutches but was told to put some weight on my bad foot. I was doing that and a little swine kicked my crutch as he rushed past to get into Argos and my foot was already heading to the ground and a similar pain to jumping down from the bed was felt, though not as pronounced. Still pretty bad though.

Instead of having the two categories - manipulated and unmanipulated, you could have a stitched and cropped category. That way those without a tripod and the photoshop techniques could enter the cropped category and those who have the time and the know-how could enter the stitched category. How does that sound?

Why not panorama? If you only stick to your comfort zone you'll learn very little. I think the POTM should challenge the competitors.

Obviously not everyone will have the tripod or the abilities to stitch together several shots to make a panoramic, but I'll try to find a tutorial to post for you. If that fails, I'll post one of my own, but it won't be perfect as I hate stitching them together - the blending is damn hard. If people can't do that though, they could always crop it. It's not going to be more than 1024 x 768 size so resolution shouldn't be a problem. I say go for it. :thumbsup:

I would love my last thoughts to be about the meaning of life, so it finally comes to me. If I was dying with family and friends around me, I would like to think I would have words of comfort to offer them.

Sorry for the late votes - I've been pretty busy myself. :D So for the unmanipulated image I vote for DementedHero's entry - Sleeping Cat. It just has so much character in my opinion. And the manipulated image I'm voting for is xvillexvalox - Bird. It's simply fantastic.

Well, I guess the worst day I've had is not so much the day itself. More what the consequences that followed that day. The worst day I've had this year would be having a terrible dose of the flu - the real stuff not "man flu". And as a result I missed most of my prelims (exams used to determine what I'm likely to attain in the final exams and also used as appeal material if I do badly in the final exams) So the worst day I had was when I was really bad with the flu, it was snowing and I had my chemistry exam. So I dragged myself out of bed and on the way into school I was "Snow Manned" (being shoved down into the snow and having snow kicked over you) This didn't make me feel any better. Then I went into the exam hall shivering my friend said: "you look like you're going to die" I looked pretty white. My nose was running and I kept coughing but I kept going through the exam. I had a roll of toilet roll to blow my nose on, but it was in my bag and I didn't want the invigilators to think I was cheating and render my paper void. The heating wasn't working so the school were sent home after the first paper. I went home and didn't leave the house for about two weeks. This meant I missed about a weeks worth of prelims and I had to come in to school during the in-service days to complete some of them. And it took a good few weeks for my papers to be completed and marked. Mind you, I got 8 1s - grade 1s being the top credit grade. So even with my flu I could still do the exams. That would have to be my worst day ever.

Cockney Rhyming Slang? I'm not sure. :?

4/10, I'm sorry but I can't read that text. :(

Buy a good book with the notation rather than tablature. The notation helps with your inventing if you take music at school. Examiners aren't too keen on Tab stuff. Or so I've been told :-k But anyway, get a good book that has step by step lessons in it. Don't skip any of the steps, no matter how easy you find them. That way you're working 100% from the book rather than going with what you know till you reach a point where the book has to explain something that it has taught differently than you've taught yourself and you're stuck at that level. It won't be easy and will require alot of dicipline, but I'm sure you'll get hours of enjoyment out of your new instrument.

The horizontal lines are not straight. You see the road? It's not straight and that's not very good for the composition in my opinion, if it was unaviodable, leave it out. EDIT: What what was the film speed, I think I see a bit of grain in the second one? I like film grain though, it tends to add mood unlike digital noise.

I've got to agree with Nadril. I know you and I have never seen eye to eye but I'm gonna comment on your images anyway. The first one isn't very balanced compositionally and there are areas that have been overexposed. There's too much of the extremes in it for me. The second is better compositionally and could have been improved even more had you straightened it up. It's a bit squinty. I like the partial silohette (sp?) of the tree with the light from what looks like the moon. I'm not sure of the burnt out bits in the sign but the photo works well for me, go back and take a photo without the squinty composition and it might work a bit better. Let's leave our differences aside for just now and keep the topic on your photos and not make it a flame war. :pray:

You might want to answer this question then: I answered but my view is against piercings on anyone. Your view is that it's okay on women but not on men. If only for my curiosity could you answer Deloriagod's question?

That's the one I was thinking of too.