I agree with all the above points, great action and sharp, plus nice colours - a most interesting set , even for a non-sportsy person!

I think some parts of the white tops on the players have blown out a bit, maybe something to consider with metering ... lucky they weren't getting married

The best are 1 & 2 IMO .... 1 is amazing, you can hardly see where the page ends and the photo starts which is really interesting - the background works brilliantly, and so clever to have got the face!

No 2 is fantastic - a great span of wings and full-on action - the graininess in the background is not unattractive, but you might try blurring it a little to smooth it more - and perhaps the bird is a touch over-sharpened?

No 3 has some vignetting going on at the left corners.

I've had a look again at No 6 here, with the yellow 'features', as Alan raised the issue of the composition, so here's a couple of alternative crops ... first one is a bit tighter and the 2nd is a total rethink with a square shape. Would like to know what you all think works best


Crop 1







Crop 2

I love the rooftop shot with its creative depth of field which works perfectly for this subject. Not so taken with the others, I feel they would be better closer in, but they do convey that autumnal feeling!

I do agree with you there to a point ... I would never do certain things, like swap a sky from one shot into another one, or add people in, that kind of thing ... But I do take multiple exposures of the same scene in order to use HDR or exposure blending, but that is with the aim of increasing realism by reproducing the dynamic range more as the eye can see it ... It's not always successful of course, but usually better than a single frame where the camera cannot technically cope with the DR.

And I will happily remove the odd small interference, eg a drink can I hadn't noticed, where it can be cloned out and replaced by its own background ...I have no issue with that at all, and I do not consider it to mean that I failed as a photographer to properly prepare the shot, not at all.

Let me also make my point about camera jpeg output a different way ... Say I was to take a RAW file and open in in photoshop camera raw, turning off all auto default adjustments. Then I made a few tiny moves on a few sliders, resulting in a photo that was just a little bit different to what it first looked like.

Well, if I then looked at the camera jpeg produced of the same shot, it is very likely that in fact the camera had made significantly more processing changes, more adjustment, dynamic range compression, saturation and contrast boosting ... Much more' overdone ' than my subtle efforts in photoshop.

The is no logic to equating a camera produced jpeg with the concept of ' straight out the camera' and less processed... It is nothing of the sort.

Unfair yes, apart from the advantage of having Pentax jpegs, what if someone had a camera with no aa filter ... would the others therefore be allowed to crank up the sharpening on their camera settings to even things out?

I can fully appreciate the discipline involved in having to get the composition and exposure right at capture - I hadn't even thought of those as they are really a given for me ... sure, I might frame a little wide if there would be any distortion correction needed as that might also involve cropping, but generally we should all aim to capture the framing and exposure exactly as wanted - that way there's no waste.

Well, its something to talk about and debate for us on the forum, just like the jpeg activity is something for Johns camera club members to do - all part of the fun and interest that is photography!

There may be a fair bit of semantics involved as well ... Philip, we are really saying the same thing about jpegs & RAW - yes, the RAW file is adjusted to produce the Jpeg, but its still an adjustment, editing and manipulation within the camera.

Stub62, I feel that you are not seeing the point here that what the camera outputs is in fact also 'computer programming', very similar to the processes involved in editing images on a computer, but just carried out by a tiny micro-computer to more tightly controlled parameters and more limited capability overall, and with much more generic, pre-programmed results.

As said before, this may be an advantage in some situations, better for an individual than spending time on the computer .... but it will never offer the same ultimate potential as high quality editing work on a computer using the camera RAW file.

Of course Philip, that could be an agreed definition of what would be a valid file to enter ... But it does not add up to anything that could reasonably be described as unadjusted, our perhaps more accurately as what many label ' straight out of the camera'. It is the mistaken assumption of ' purity' that is often attached to this label that I am challenging.

Every camera jpeg is processed, edited, adjusted, manipulated ... whatever you call it, by the cameras tiny computer according to pre -set default adjustments as programmed into it. The fact that every make and model comes with different types, amounts, default start-points and brand specific style characteristics must adds up even more to the inevitable conclusion that such a thing as an unadjusted camera jpeg does not exist. For the purpose of comparison it really is meaningless.

I'm not being mean and saying we can't have fun with our cameras at the camera club and enjoy this sort of thing ... Of course not, that's what its all about ... But we should not be perpetuating the myth that what we are outputting constitutes some kind of original, pure, un-fiddled with thing ... It simply does not.

I believe by logic there exists no such thing as your club is trying to define ... All camera jpegs are of course 'adjusted' ... Simply leaving the custom setting sliders at the zero position does not constitute ' unadjusted' .... A zero position on a slider is nothing more than a pre-determined and fixed amount of adjustment relating to that parameter.

For example, '0' amount of saturation slider does NOT mean the camera processor has made no saturation adjustment ... It really means that the photographer has not made any alteration to the camera pre-set amount of saturation for the particular custom image preset that it's active ... In every sense of the word, by every logical definition, there is actual adjustment applied.

Even if you now make a definition based on no user alteration from the zero position, that is meaningless because of the variations in default levels between the different models and makes.