It's horses for courses. Like Matt, I use matrix most of the time. My wife however, uses spot all the time along with centre point AF. She applies compensation as needed depending on the point metered from, locks AF and AE with a half press, recomposes the framing as required and takes the shot. It's all a question of your own particular style of photography and finding techniques that work for you.

We both shoot raw format to allow that bit more lattitude if needed.

Duncan

Another vote of thanks for #1.

It's got to be the late Bob Carlos Clarke, a troubled genius.

Moving article for those that care to read it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?xml=/fashion/2007/03/21/efcarlos21...

Do you mean the infamous RiceHigh?

Duncan

Cosmin,

Lovely, touching image with good use of lead lines. The green top on the woman reallt helps draw attention. Very sympathetic to the subjects.


Peter,
I was going to add to this thread by adding a post with embedded image until I saw your post. Yes, you can use the gallery to post images, but 1 image per day is somewhat limiting. Suggest 4/day as a realistic limit if you want the idea to take off? 1/day will stop the idea becoming the norm for posting images - sad, because a dedicated user gallery was the one thing I (and my wife, who is a keen photographer) really thought was missing from the site.

If you adjust the resolution to 72 dpi before posting then 1024px max will prevent any serious risk of image theft. JPEG compression can be reduced to "7" (in photoshop) without serious loss of detail and get the image size down to about typically 100kB at this image size - depending on subject.

As I've mentioned before, I moderate elsewhere and I spend a lot of time PM'ing new members telling them that they don't need to apply jpeg factor 12 for posting web images, you really, really can't see the difference in most cases. There is this obsession with people analysing the pixels not the picture (thanks to DPR I suspect). As such, people are scared to apply any jpeg compression for fear of having the artifacts critiqued, not the picture. I ignore such comments.

Please, allow bigger images. For those that are worried about image theft, let them post miniatures. For the rest of us, let us post our dross at larger sizes.

Duncan

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear....... I thought 800 pixels was quite limiting....

Is there any point this thread remaining "sticky" now? The top of the section is getting a bit cluttered, and it's not particularly clear with the new layout which threads are sticky, and which aren't.

Have to disagree on the latter point Dan. I moderate on another photography forum, we get three distinct groups of members
1) Those who post exclusively in the forum section
2) Those who post exclusively in the gallery section
3) Those who do a bit of both (probably the smallest group of the three)

At the moment, because the gallery is a new feature, the established membership here is probably going to fall into category 1) with a migration to group 3) as the gallery becomes more established. New members may well be die-hard group 2) users, we have PLENTY of members who never even look at messages, but leave lots of comments on gallery images.

We do agree on the 550px max dimension for gallery posts, and I see that this applies to images linked into posts too now. This is really pants. I find the old max of 800px overly restrictive for landscape format, though it was fine for portrait format. 550px is ludicrously small for a landscape format picture. If we were all running screens set to 800x600 then I could understand, but not these days, please.

Can I suggest max pixels 1024 wide or 800 high be adopted?

Duncan

I agree that the chance of getting hurt is slim, but even if people don't hurt you, they will behave differently, they may well not want their picture taken and hide their face or react in some other negative way. I want to take pictures of people going about their everyday lives without reacting to an "intrusion" of the camera/photographer.

D.