Well said, this sums up my take on photography I try to avoid just taking random pictures in the hope of getting a keeper, prefering to compose, light and expose an image which I consider pleasing to myself and hopefully other people. Some people just use photography to record personal events in their lives such as weddings, birthdays, and holidays, etc which acts as an historical record. They will quite happily snap away capturing the event and not be overly concerned with the composition, lighting, etc, it's just the event which is important to them. To consider ourselves as artists an event provides us with an opportunity to indulged our artistic side prefering to capture original images which move away from random snaps. The event is of secondary importance it's just providing an occasion to indulge our artistic side.

Thanks for the tip Matt very useful, so here goes despeckled and cropped as per Womble:

[IMG]http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f343/Noddy750/pangormacro043mod.jpg[/IMG]

Thanks for the comments but I must confess to an error on the second image, I made an additional copy to sharpened it so I could compare the effect with the original, but unfortunately I sharpened the original then copied it, doh and for the life of me I don't know how to unsharpen. The original has a more subtle effect where as the above image I find a bit harsh. Ah well you live and learn.

Almost fell off my chair

I'd asked for advice on how best to approach macro photography and these are the results.

Please feel free to comment as I'm here to learn

[IMG]http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f343/Noddy750/pangormacro087small.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f343/Noddy750/pangormacro041small.jpg[/IMG]

Sorry I've not been clear, it's the border why can't they be say round, triangular, star shaped etc, we just accept that pics are presented in square/rectangular format, I know we can present our image within the frame in any shape/form just as Chris has presented (which I do like Chris) but it's still framed square/rectangular. I think say a circular frame would present a more dynamic image, providing the picture is OK of course. But as Malo suggests we don't accept pictures in any other shaped format because we assume that this is the norm. Ah as my mother used to say "Devil makes work for idle hands".

I've got one

LIWID

"Little Idea What I'm Doing" hope this helps

It's Sunday and the weather is grey and dull, so I sat back and browsed various photo gallery's and got to wondering why do we have to have square pictures, now I know there will a host technical reasons as to why but I just thought would'nt it be great if you could have any shape we wanted? It just seems that we accept that pictures should be square, ah well to much time on my hands again.

I really like the second blue one more so than the original, a bit unconvential but it works for me. Not so sure about the altered version though, jury's out on that one at the moment.

I don't thinks it's a mistake Mike just personal preference, as always with human nature we all like different things, if we all like the same it would be boring and there would be no creative talent. Love the sharpness and bokeh on the M 135mm though.