[CauseISaidSo]

rav, I might be interested. What are looking to get including shipping?

[CauseISaidSo]

Congrats on your first 1st, rav!

I thought I was going to have my first top ten this week, but it was not to be. Still my highest placer and highest vote getter, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

[CauseISaidSo]

Elsinore: If you need to spend so many words talking for your picture, then maybe your picture doesn’t say enough on its own?

That’s a good point, too. I guess I should clarify that I like captions that are more titles than descriptions or recipes for reproduction.

[CauseISaidSo]

I’m with olavf on both points.

In regards to captioning, for example with this theme where the photo is meant to represent an abstract idea, I’d like to know what feeling or idea the photographer was going for. I know some artists want the viewer to come to their own conclusions, and I certainly do that when viewing a photo I’m interested in, but sometimes when you know what the artist was going for, you can see things in the picture that you might’ve otherwise overlooked, if that makes sense.

Note that I’m not complaining about lack of caption for this contest – I’m completely OK with the theme originator making the rules.

[CauseISaidSo]

Kestrana: …notable new voices… Thanks! *sniff* That may be one of the nicest things a stranger on the internet has ever said about me. 😉

I just checked my Fark account date and in a strange coincidence it turns out today is exactly the 7th anniversary of my signup. During that time, other than my recent posts in the Farktography contests, I’ve posted exactly once. All of which I say to emphasize my credentials as a long-time lurker. So, here’s a slightly different take on recent discussions from the POV of an “outsider”:

* Increased participation beyond a certain point may not be a desirable thing from a viewer’s standpoint. When I browsed the Farktography threads, I found that I could only seriously consider so many entries before either giving up or fast-scrolling to the end.

* From a strictly financial viewpoint, the eyes-on-a-page count is probably more important to Fark, LLC than the number of participants (which may only correlate up to a certain point based on #1). I’m guessing probably only Drew would know how those numbers have fluctuated.

* As a viewer, I found some of the more “esoteric” themes (probably what some are describing as likely to limit casual participation) quite enjoyable. It was always interesting to see the different interpretations.

* As a participant, I certainly understand the desire to shoot new material specific to a theme (and I hope I get time to start doing that soon, but honestly all of my shots thus far are from the archives). But as a viewer, I really prefer both. Archival shots are likely to be of scenic or interesting places or infrequent events that would otherwise not be convenient to shoot within any given week.

* Casual participants with P&S’s can still be competitive. Much to my chagrin, 3 of my top 4 placing pix (including this week’s) were taken with a P&S.

[CauseISaidSo]

Dangit, orionid, stop living my dream! 🙁

Between this and the hardware hacking & high-speed photography you did with the strobe controller, you’ve hit three of the items on my “things I want to play around with when I have the free time” list. Unfortunately, “free time” is an exceedingly rare commodity, so enjoy it while you have it, kids. It seems the older you get, the more likely it is that someone will always have an answer to the question of “is there anything else that needs done right now?” 🙂

[CauseISaidSo]

Thanks for the kind words, all.

And thanks for the offer, ravnostic. I haven’t gotten any requests for it yet (probably afraid of binaries from unknown sources and can’t say as I blame anyone), but if I do I might take you up on that.

It really has a pretty limited usefulness, other than just playing around and seeing what different images look like through the filters (which I ended up doing for a few hours after I wrote it :)).

[CauseISaidSo]

Exactly. So if you set the Max RGB Error to 1, run an image through the Errors in red or Error mask filters, and it returns an error count of 0, then every pixel in that image is a shade of pure gray.

[CauseISaidSo]

OK, time to let my geek flag fly, I guess. All this discussion of how to figure out the “grayness” of a picture got me to thinking last night, so I threw some code together to experiment with somehow quantifying grayness.

It’s too late for this contest, but U-Man, andyofne and others with forms of color blindness may find it useful for these types of themes. You could probably even use it to enforce some kind of quantitative theme rules, assuming you’d want to bother with running all the entries through it.

It’s a long post so I won’t overwhelm this thread with it, but if you’re interested I’ve posted it in the Software forum.

[CauseISaidSo]

Display Method: Absolute RGB error distance

Starts with the Subtract gray method, then scales the leftover color components as a percentage of the maximum error. This shows exactly which colors are pushing a pixel out of pure grayness. For our sample pixel, after subtracting gray we wound up with (30,0,34). Scaling that to a max error of 25 gives us (255,0,255), which is pure magenta and shows us that there?s much more red & blue in this pixel than green:

That?s it. Like I said, if anyone?s interested the app to play around with just let me know.

[CauseISaidSo]

Display Method: Subtract gray

Subtracts the lowest color component value from all color components. For our sample pixel, the lowest value is green at 72, so subtracting 72 from the other components gives us (30,0,34):

If there?s anything visibly recognizable with this one, it might have too much color for a B&W/gray theme. For a pure B&W image (or a color one that?s been completely desaturated), this would produce a completely black image.

[CauseISaidSo]

Display Method: RGB error distance

Changes the color component of each pixel to show its relative distance from the max error value. For our sample pixel, CE(R)=26 which scales to 255, CE(G)=30 which scales to 255, and CE(B)=4 which scales to 4/25 * 255 = 41 so the pixel would be colored (255,255,41):

[CauseISaidSo]

Display Method: Largest error distance (color coded)

Same as Largest error distance, but colors the pixels with the component that has the largest error instead of gray. For our sample pixel, green has the largest CE at 30 which scales to the max value of 255, so our pixel would be colored pure green (0,255,0):

[CauseISaidSo]

Display Method: Largest error distance

Same as previous, but uses whichever component error is largest. For our sample pixel, the largest CE is 30, which scales to the max value of 255, so the pixel would be colored white (255,255,255):

[CauseISaidSo]

Display Method: Average error distance

Illustrates the distance that the average component error is from the max error. For our sample pixel RGB(128, 72, 106), the average CE is 20. With a max error of 25, that scales to 20/25 * 255 = 204, so the pixel would get colored RGB(204,204,204):

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