Photo.net in My Inbox

Superstar photography website Photo.net, has finally started sending out newsletters via email. I say finally because I've never been able to keep up with the site as a casual reader. There's too much new stuff going on there, all the time, especially in the forums and critiques.

Really, if you want to become a great photographer, you should probably just read every word on that site as scripture and create some sort of critique dependency graph to follow before you take a photo. I guess the idea there is that if you learn to avoid the pitfalls that make bad photographs, you can make good photographs.

What do I mean by "critique dependency graph"? It's actually quite simple. Imagine taking a picture at the beach. You personally have a few things in mind about how you want the image to look, but you've also absorped a bunch of suggestions from the critiques you read. The "dependency graph" tells you how you should apply them to get the great shot. You saw Joe state the the rule of thirds should not be broken, so you decide you will compose your shot with that in mind. John has stated that the use of a polarizing filter can make the blue sky bluer and the white puffy clouds whiter. One of Jill's past critiques delt with a shot where the subjects head was below the horizon, making the subject look dwarfed. Which do you consider first? It seems obvious to me, that you would have to find an angle where the subject will be partially above the horizon before you can compose with the rule of thirds. However, you could have placed the polarizer on your camera before you composed, or before you found the shot angle.

Anyway, the debut newsletter (they're using a newsletter service), is pretty much what you'd expect out of a newsletter. Short intros to this months featured articles, product reviews, current photo of the week and of course this months projects.

If you didn't get the newsletter but would like to be reminded of photo.net monthly, you might as well subscribe.