The point is that 'street photography' is a readily accepted and understood genre.....

....so, if a main genre is picked as the topic of competition it's not really good form to then judge the entries by inappropriate standard for that genre.

I mistakenly (apparently not alone) thought we were giving 'street photography' a try,...various famous 'street' protagonists were mentioned in the first post along with;...."I'd like to see what you can do with real life on the street. .."

I was actually inspired to enter by the great 'Street' shots of Lilly and Deecy and, frankly, expected one of them to win. It may be a very wonderful 'back of a blokes head' for all I know,....the point is that there were other "real life on the street" entries.

Hi John,

Well, there really has been far less inovation by SLR makers (during the lst 30 years) than in nearly every other area of consumer product....

There has, of course been the advent of digital, but this was effectively forced upon makers rather than being a result of their inovation,...essentially, we have had auto focus which is at best a doubtful development and whic has been mainly for the benefit of makers since it is far cheaper to implement than to engineer a helical focussing mount.

The Canon T90 appeared in the mid 70's and was the watered down results of the design work by Luigi Colani. Shortly after there were reports of his frustration with the ultra conservative Canon management.

The T90 set the path of SLR design in a slightly different direction and offered substantial manufacturing benefits to the makers since the camera was largely injection moulded from black plastic. Essentially, we are still using the same model, albeit digitalised.

The makers are only just getting used to the idea of articulated lcd screens and that has been half hearted. The major danger is that with the ease of modern electronics makers will resort to the addition of numerous and pointless gimics to attempt an image of sophistication and facility. This has already happened to a degree but hopefully will not go the same way as with camcorders where features are often unusable i any real terms.

After using medium and large fromat systems for so many years I have always been frustrated by the lack of inovation in DSLR models which are essentially Luigi Colani's Canon prototype 'black plastic blob' from 1972(?) with a sensor thrown inside. It seems incredible that the last thirty plus years have seen SLR makers basically turning their faces to the wall as far as product inovation is concerned. It hardly takes great leaps of imagination to realise the huge increase in facility of a modern small digital imaging system rather than the same old SLR with sensor and something 'different' from one of the makers seems well overdue especially since they all make more or less the same camera with different name tags....

Well, here is and interesting and thought provoking item on the continuing convergence of still and video and what that may mean for photographers in the coming few years;

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/convergence.shtml

Materstroke of Dr Mhuni making the subject of the comp 'rain',......

This makes it a safe bet that there will be fine dry weather untill Friday at least....

....can get on with putting up my new shed.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/phase-645.shtml

Interesting overview of the current state of play with digital MF,...also first look at the new Mamiya digital MF which is more or less the old 645 with sensor added,.....presumably very similar to what we can expect from pentax sometime soon.....

Things have actually 'got better' with the price of PS in the UK,...a couple of years back when I was weighing up the prices/packages the UK and US prices were the same digits!!....so PS was effectively TWICE the price here!! An outrageous and arrogant policy on the part of Adobe in my view. However, the fact is that Adobe are a company of doubtful business methods all round from what I can see. So far, I not found a single instance of Adobe products actually working properly in either PS, 'Premier' or 'Adobe Reader'....maybe i'm just stupid or unlucky! Certainly, good design seems to be a difficult concept for the Adobe minds.

The real matter perhaps is whether one really needs to use PS at all(?)...thankfully there are an increasing number of alternatives and, lets not forget, some serious disadvantages to getting involved with PS, apart from the high price.

I can't help feeling that PS is often used as a stick to beat photographers with,.....the implication being that, since it's the 'industry standard' only 'real' photographers use it to the exclusion of anything else. The actual situation is that PS is the 'industry standard' for the print preparation industry largely due to it's historical placement as the first product in it's field. Much of the content of PS is/was not intended for photographers despite the name. Adobe have virtually admitted as much with their introduction of Lightroom,..although they are urging photographers to see a need for both!?

If one needs basic editing of contrast, colour saturation, sharpness etc., without having to edit five hundred files at a sitting, does one really need nearly a thousand quids worth of software?....plenty of the photosnobs on the web say that one does but their claims are increasingly frantic as better software emerges.

In the last few weeks I have been using a computer with PS CS2 already installed so I have taken the oppportunity to 'try' seriously to get my head around it and make a final decision as to it's actual value. It's not been at all easy! The 650 page book from the library is helping but progress is tortuous and problematic at every corner. Just getting my RAW files loaded took a week of evenings and has not been entirely successful as I can't see the thumbnails in the 'Bridge' sub program which serves as a browser.

Advice from 'mattmatic' on this site suggests that the RAW converter of PS does NOT give the best image quality anyway,... so much for the 'industry standard'!! The real question has become; do I really need this huge complexity with it's even bigger time commitment to get good images?

Thankfully, there are an increasing number of good alternatives. LightZone is a nice piece of easily understood software now in its third (?) version and getting better each time. There is also 'PaintShop Pro',..at one time considered to be interchangeable with PS,....and the little known 'Picture Window Pro' is an excellent product from the designer of the old 'Lotus 123' office package. I'm sure there are others.

The street light in the tree....a quick snap to try out the anti-shake and 1600iso.