I took photos of the University's Bookstore Children's Program on Saturday. The theme was "Taking Flight" and featured 
paper airplane making. Then, the kids tested their planes for accuracy through a hoop. Following a distance contest, some put on a brave face in defeat. And to both winners and losers there were airplane cookies to eat, starting with the wings.
I give you a 5 to cancel phill's 1 rating. He seems to get a kick out of doing it...
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I'm not entirely sure what to think of it, especially without comment. I know they're not brilliant contributions to the canon of elite photographs destined for the Smithsonian, but I didn't think they would cause cancer, either. This sort of thing is why I don't rate, I just comment.
- here and there
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I thought you had some cute photos in there. Sure, they weren't prizewinning, but it was a good documentary. I agree with you on the ratings. I hardly ever rate photos, simply because it's so arbitrary. People can rate on whether the subject matter appeals to them; on a photo's technical merit; on the creativity; whether they like the poster personally.. etc. Seeing "popular" posters get higher ratings than I feel they deserve or newbies getting lower ratings, I've just gotten jaded by the system. Perhaps it might help, if, like photo.net, there were 2 or more ratings categories, such as technical merit, creativity, and personal preference. Although, I'm afraid to say most people probably wouldn't really have the ability to clearly understand and respond to categories such as those. I'm glad at least we can see who's doing the rating, so we know who to take seriously.
- Photographer
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I didn't rate this post very high because the photos didn't really stand out in any way (except for the thumbnail, that's great). Had I been reading through a magazine with these in them, I wouldn't have wanted to see what they were from. As for aiding with the story, they were ok, but again didn't really stand out to me. I hope you don't take my lower rating personally. If you enjoy the photos, then enjoy them. Someone's always going to have a different opinion.
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i gave a 3 on these photos.. i enjoyed the photos, but in general some of the composition was a bit distracting. I would have liked them better if they focused more on one subject, or if some of the distractions were taken out.. I really liked the thumbnail photo, and the one of the girl eating cookies. Those actually were very interesting photos, while most of the others were a little more busy. If in a magazine or something, I probably would have skipped them over.. Keep up the good work!
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The thumbnail image was wonderful, so much stronger than the image it was cropped from. I felt that most of them could be improved a lot just by a bit of cropping, to really get a connection with the children. They're still nice as a recording of the occasion, but that's probably more of interest to people who were involved than it is to people like me who have nothing to do with it.
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I have an internal debate all the time about the differences between cropping a photo and maintaining its reality/documentary feel. These were indeed taken for our website so that parents could see their kids (more are here if you care) and in this case, for this purpose, I thought it made the event more "real" to demonstrate that the kids were all over the place, not posing perfectly. For the thumbnail, I felt like that's a little ad to draw you in, so it was cropped to focus on that little girl--incidentally, she's at every Children's event I photograph and is very photogenic! Anyway, I understand the criticism and will try to make the next batch better.
- here and there
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i understand what you're saying, i have that same issue sometimes in my photos, knowing when, and when not to crop the subject.
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I was actually thinking about redoing the rating system. I agree, the numbers that the system assigns are pretty useless and tend to just piss people off.
Perhaps we do need to shift from the one, useless number to two photo.net style ratings. Or maybe just abondon the system as a failure.
- The Beachmaster
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