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[gothikduck]

One of the things I've come to realize, recently, is that I'm still not a very trusting person. Part of me would love to blame this on some catastrophic event or series thereof in my past. I certainly have plenty I could attribute it to; probably more than most people who lean on their past as some sort of excuse-making for their own faults. The

Comments

[zigamorph]

You're right, and the main reason I went with a Pentax digital body was to be able to reuse all of my film lenses. I've been really happy with it, and I've posted a bunch of comments about my experiences, including a critical perspective on a Popular Photography review and a summary of my thoughts after using it for seven months.

[zigamorph]

I didn't really have time to look though the portfolio you linked. You have hundreds of photos posted, but I did make some quasi-random selections and was very impressed. You work with costumes and filters a lot more than I ever did. Your composition is great and your nature work is outstanding

[zigamorph]

It's not the cameras. When I first got a cell phone that had a camera in it, I assumed it would be absolute crap. It's not good, certainly, with a shutter release lag that sometimes runs as long as two seconds, 1.3MP resolution, and color balance that could be best be described as random. However, I've been able with that to get results on occasion far better than a lot of what I see other people shooting with much more capable cameras, simply through knowing basic rules of composition, accepting the limitations of what I was using, and - most importantly - being alert to seeing the possibility of a good image. Here is an example:

[duskofhallows98]

Armed with an army of ass-kissing lesser hacks, tag-alongs, pathetic self-esteem pity cases, and trendies, it's amazing what the truly terrible photographer or graphic artist can actually accomplish in terms of "status" - which still remains a completely arbitrary and meaningless term....

Sounds like the so-called "deathrock" scene. Also sounds like the Poetry world. The "everybody's a muthafuckin' poet" attitude and the slam poetry craze have virtually destroyed Poetry. The internet played a huge role in its demise.

[gothikduck]

No, not forfeit-your-copyright Poetry.com, and the "slam" poetryprose scene destroying poetry?! ;-) I always despised the history of that movement -- anything based on audience reaction is always going to end in a gladiator fight, not an art display. With it being so college-based it was amusing/disturbing to watch wave after wave of mediocre "poets" playing A.W. Guy and A.B. Bitch to self-amused audiences, over and over again. My partner in our poetry group actually had a piece mocking the fact that it seemed like every other girl had a man-hating "strong woman" "poem," but it was, of course, only the ones who were naive enough to get stuck with these losers in the first place! I could rant about idiotic nuances in the poetry circuit forever, though... it's amazing what people will do to convince you that ego is an adequate substitute for knowledge

[duskofhallows98]

In the library profession, everyone rants about Slam poetry like it's the end-all-be-all, but as a Young Adult Librarian, I refuse to do it. This usually stuns the PC'brarians into gaping silence

[gothikduck]

It's kind of sad that your fellow librarians would have such a love for "slam" poetry... my experience with it, and I have years of it, has always been that it is intellectually repetitive, persona based, and grammatically inept. The only reason it seems to procreate its embracing of self-expression through character creation, which is to say it's more like a bad comedy night than true self-expression. (I should mention, I've had a hand in facilitating a good comedy series as well... but "slam" was not on the menu