This is unbelievable. Been following this, but have refrained from posting because well.. w/e I had this other really long book written out for this, but deleted it. I just lost track of what I was talking about.
Bottom line, this is an amateur forum, and should be considered as such. There's alot of people who have seen the same stuff over and over again on here (and other forums), and after a while it just grinds the wrong way and people snap.
I think that's what happened here.
There's a few people on here, who like Derrel said in his (great) post, we learned when Photoshop didn't exist yet, so you had to get it right the first time. Photography used to be part engineering. We have single 8x10 transparencies at the studio which were shot on 5 different cameras on 5 different sets, and are jaw-dropping to think that this is straight out of camera and shot in 1985. Digital looks cheap in comparison.
It's the difference between "shooting for the edit" and "shooting for the print".
there's alot of coulda-shoulda-woulda in this thread, and i admit, when i said "try to get it right the first time", it was probably of little or no help. If i was in those shoes with that experience, it would have gotten me nowhere because i wouldn't know what to look for. Just look at my first posts 4 years ago, they're laughable, and even the new ones are.
the thing is when you start posting images up anywhere on or offline, there are going to be people who disagree with them, and that's part of sharing your pictures, enjoying the praise and eating the crits.
There has been some good advice on here, it may come off as cynical, but there really has. The more you work on your technique and the more you look at pictures (not just your own), the more you'll be able to see what's good, what's bad, and what's ugly.
And when you start charging for what you're doing, yeah different strokes-different folks, but $25 clients give $25 results.
Ask yourself some questions, if you hired a photographer to take pictures of your kid and they charged $25, what would you expect? If they charged $400 what would you expect? $850?
what sort of bracket do you want your images to reflect?
If commercial photography was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Look at the pictures you like, analyze them. Copy them. try to do the same thing. You'll learn alot.
Learning photography is like learning to drive. When you first start out, you'll stall the engine, your parents will be yelling at you to shift, and it's overwhelming at first. But after a while you stop even thinking about shifting and you just do it. it comes naturally. And the only way to getting around to that is experience.
With forums, It's one thing to talk about driving a car and talking about shifting the gears, but it's completely different to actually doing it.
No matter where you go, you'll always find assholes that give tough criticism, but it says alot about your character with how you take it, do you get discouraged and quit? or do you eat it and digest what they mean and move on?
