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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 6:56 pm 
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I have to say I agree with Aylin on this. Photography has been a passion of mine for years and it has taken a considerable amount of effort for me to learn to capture the right moments, in the right light. Photography is not just a point and click kind of thing. If your target is moving, you have to know when to click. You have to be carfeul at which angle to shoot from, and how to center a shot. There is a lot of thinking, calculating and planning involved. I have had friend's and family attempt to take shots of my kids and their parties and can tell you most of them aren't photo book worthy. They capture people and animal butts, blurs, too many people to tell what is happening in an image, odd angles, and crazy looks as people blink, wipe food from their faces and etc. It is important that the person behind a camera know what they are doing.


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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 7:12 pm 
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Again, while knowing when to click is good, there is so much more to it than that. With my Nikon D90, I can take about 4 pics per second of moving targets. I need no knowledge of photography to get a good shot.

Now, if people taking pics, and the judges know how to set their ISO, f-stop, etc. and are using manual focus to adjust as they go, that is a different story. but I don't think anyone here is talking about those skills. We are talking about: 1. Point 2. Click 3. edit on computer 4. print 5. Display it pretty.

In that way, it is the technology doing the bulk of the work, not the person.

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 16, 2013 9:28 pm 
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Taking non-blurry pictures of moving targets is not what I would consider the skill of photography. Virtually everything important that goes into taking good pictures happens before "1. Point."


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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 12:38 am 
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Actually, I am talking about manually adjusting the focus. I do it on all our photos. It can be the difference in getting a shot that tells a story and a shot that looses the story. I reiterate that there is mpre to taking a good shot than just pointing and clicking, even if you have a good camera. I can take some fantastic shots with my camera, due to many years of practice taking photos and having a pretty nice camera. Put the same camera in my kids hands or my mother's and the photos are mostly trash. They have good color and can be taken rapidly so the people are in focus, but they lack purpose, focus and leave out the story.


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 Post Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 3:00 pm 
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Darkangel wrote:
Taking non-blurry pictures of moving targets is not what I would consider the skill of photography. Virtually everything important that goes into taking good pictures happens before "1. Point."

That is exactly my point.

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 Post Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 3:16 pm 
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Forest Evergreen wrote:
Darkangel wrote:
Taking non-blurry pictures of moving targets is not what I would consider the skill of photography. Virtually everything important that goes into taking good pictures happens before "1. Point."

That is exactly my point.


I thought your point was that photography should involve a technical skill, and modern technology replaces that skill, making it irrelevant. My point is that photography is about thematics, artistic awareness, technical skill, and appraisal. The technical side of it has been simplified in terms of lighting, blurriness, etc. but even the best camera isn't going to point you at the best thing to take pictures of.

Backing it up, though, it's not clear to me what the art of photography has to do with the fantasy milieu. I enjoy taking nature pictures and pictures of buildings. To me, it's usually about capturing that moment when something extraordinary is perceived in an environment that is ordinary. I enjoy taking those pictures and I have occasionally entered them in Amtgard competitions, mostly because I have them. I think it's kinda-sorta relevant to Amtgard, because nature pictures can lend themselves to the fantastic, and pictures of the park or Amgard battles are documents of Amtgard. But it's very meta, like Publication or Rose. It's not really part of the game and it's not a medieval art form. It's a club thing. With that in mind, assuming Photography doesn't get folded up into Publication and 2d art, I think it could use an improved focus.

Photography is not the only category to have problems being relevant to Amtgard. There are generally no requirements that Fiction be very Amtgard-relevant. At this DM, I entered a non-Amtgard publication, partly because I was curious what would happen. There were no rules against it, and if it were penalized in the scoring, it can't have been by that much.


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 Post Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 7:23 pm 
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Darkangel wrote:
Forest Evergreen wrote:
Darkangel wrote:
Taking non-blurry pictures of moving targets is not what I would consider the skill of photography. Virtually everything important that goes into taking good pictures happens before "1. Point."

That is exactly my point.


I thought your point was that photography should involve a technical skill, and modern technology replaces that skill, making it irrelevant.

It is. My point is that people who are entering and judging photography are not trained in it, and that with today's technology, we compensate by having cameras that can do 90% of the work for us and editing software that can help hide flaws.

There is no other category where the technology you are using is so dominant in the final product than in photography.

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 Post Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2013 7:58 pm 
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Forest Evergreen wrote:
It is. My point is that people who are entering and judging photography are not trained in it, and that with today's technology, we compensate by having cameras that can do 90% of the work for us and editing software that can help hide flaws.


I am not always happy with the way photography is judged, I'll give you that. However, I disagree on two levels with your statement that cameras do 90% of the work. First, on a technical level, I just don't think it's true. "The work" is setting up a shot. Not taking a shot until your parameters are where you want them to be is the same basic task, whether you use old technology or new. Insofar as modern cameras are "helpful" they also sometimes make poor decisions, unless you are talking about very high-end devices. Photography is fundamentally about composition, not dealing with basic focus and lighting.

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There is no other category where the technology you are using is so dominant in the final product than in photography.


Second, what is your actual evidence for this? In my experience, technological power has little impact on how the final product is appreciated. I can say that neither Alley Cat or I are very heavily armed in the technology department. I think the last time I entered photos, prior to this DM, I took them on a film camera of low pedigree and had them developed at Walmart. They did pretty well. This time around, I borrowed Alley Cat's digital. It's a nice little machine, but nothing fancy. We don't usually rely on unusual cropping choices, because we mostly use online photo printing services. Neither one of us uses Photoshop, and I can't even think of a time I used something like redeye remover for something I intended to show off as art. If I'm concerned about the quality of shots, I take more of them and experiment with different angles. Yet neither Alley Cat nor I have had trouble getting generally favorable scores.

I don't believe technology has that much impact on how photography is judged. I think it's more of an issue that photos tend to get scores in a very tight band of scores. My concern is that the judges aren't always sure what they are looking at, and tend to fall back on "like it/don't like it" within a fairly narrow range of scores. I think it's more of an issue that there usually isn't any obstacle to entering pictures of your car or something.


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