[Tom]

Wohoo, I made photo of the day over at Steve's Digicams. My first ever photography award . Click here (and scroll down half a page or so).

[Newt]

Congrats Tom. Pretty dog gone nice. Awesome clarity. NN

[#19]

Well deserved! A beaut!

[Ice Girl]

Way to go..... Ice Girl

[Damian]

Nice pic Tom! Congrats! I once got a photo accepted for American Rivers calendar. I was quite elated. Then they cancelled the calender that year due to budget constraints before it was even printed! However, I must confess myself content: http://www.nwog.org/gallery.htm

[Ice Girl]

Ok, i have to brag too... i got 1st, and two 2nd places at the Evergreen State Fair last year. Ice Girl

[MCaver]

Nice pic, Tom. Congratz! While we're touting our photographic achievements, I have won Photo of the Day in the Landscape/Nature category at DigitalPhotoContest.com twice. Unfortunately, they don't have a way to directly link to the photo index for a contributor, but my 2 winners are this one that's just ok, and this one that I'm pretty proud of. I have a lot of new photos to compete with once I get them all organized. The competition there is great. Lots of good photographers.

[Ice Girl]

i will put them in here to show you, as soon as i figure out how to post them, and i will have to dig them out of the photo, which are in a state of disaray. i have them in 8x 10 for in my room. but that doesn't do me much good. Ice Girl

[Newt]

Just wondering if you folks tweek your photos in an editor or are they right out of the camera. NN

[Tom]

My waterfall shot above is straight out of the camera, no camera filters, no photoshop, no nothing! I set the shutter to 1 second, bumped the exposure to +1 2/3, turned on the countdown timer, set it on a rock, pressed the shutter, and there she is... If I do anything in photoshop it's usually to fix a picture, not to enhance a picture. I might adjust brightness or contrast, crop the photo, correct the white balance, filter out a mosquito that got in the picture, etc. but it's much more the exception than the norm. I also don't like playing around with the "tweak" settings on the camera like saturation - to me that's cheating too and it makes things look unnatural to boot . I do sharpen photos slightly after resizing them for the web, but this isn't really tweaking as much as it's restoring the original sharpness. It's necessary because resizing blends adjacent pixels together creating a dulling effect. Sharpness results from differing levels of brightness from pixel to pixel, so when pixels are merged together the "sharpness" effect needs to be restored.

[MCaver]

I pretty much have the same attitude about it as Tom. I'll do things in photoshop like cropping, rotating (I'm horrible at getting photos lined up horizontally), maybe a little brightness/contrast adjustment. I do sharpen as well for the same reasons Tom posted, plus the fact that digital cameras inherently add some degree of unsharpness by nature, resized or not. I don't add any special effects or what I consider "doctoring" -- artificial color, pasting things in, etc. That goes for camera-side as well. I use a polarizing filter for glare reduction, neutral density filter for light reduction and occasionally a mild warming filter to remove the heavy blue cast on sunny days in high altitudes, but that's it. No star filters, colored filters, rainbow filters (ack!) or anything like that. My goal is to portray nature as accurately as possible, putting as little of myself (or my hand) in the photo as possible. Occasionally I might add a little artistic flair to an image that wouldn't be usable otherwise, like sepia toning or converting to black/white, but nothing that I would consider artificial. Nature is the subject, not the photographer or effects I can produce.

[Newt]

Thanks guys. That's pretty much what I ment by tweeking tho. I guess I should have said fine tuning. Nice work. NN