This one was rejected for Bad Cropping and Blurry???
This one just the bad cropping
Its been awhile since I committed to editing photos I am a little rusty so any input would be nice. Oh and before i get a ton of Rp.net sucks and eff them... It doesn't matter if I get them on the site I just want some input as I am rusty.
I don't know about the blurry part for the first photo, but back when I was trying to get shots onto RP, one of the big things that I was told was that RP likes to have the whole train in the photo or to have something between the the edge of the photo and the end of the visible part of the train. For example, the train is rounding a curve and you get the front half of the train, but the other half (or 2/3s, etc) is behind the visible part of the train, leaving room for scenery in the photo on both sides of the train.
Something else I've noticed as well, outside of the things RP has done to boost their site appeal (i.e. NS' Heritage units) even though most of their content features trains, the trains aren't the only thing in the photo. Usually there are other elements to the scene. While the obvious point of taking the picture is the train, the train is supported by the other objects. Kind of like Y@'s shot of the Farmall (sp?) tractors he posted this week (in the Illinois forum, IIRC), where there was potential for a decent shot already with just the tractors, but by waiting until the train was in the image as well, it really set off what would have been an average photo of some obsolete farm equipment, making it RP worthy. Forgetting the RP thing, it was a really cool picture anyway.
The funny thing is, sometimes the "best shots" break the rules. Staying with my tractor shot as the example you mentioned, I had to cut the train off to really make that scene work. Sometimes you just have to break the rules!
Y@ wrote:The funny thing is, sometimes the "best shots" break the rules. Staying with my tractor shot as the example you mentioned, I had to cut the train off to really make that scene work. Sometimes you just have to break the rules!
Too much grass interest first, and it needs sharpened. Second shot is a cut off wedgie roster and it is very awkwardly chopped off and everything is far too centered.
I think one of the big problems with these photos is that the focal length is too short, and you now have to crop out too much dead space. One philosophy of mine for photography is to buy longer lenses and fill my viewfinder up, which is more difficult. However, this results in less dead space and therefore I don't have to crop nearly as much and can keep most of my 22 MP's of resolution.
However, longer lenses cost money, so to help you here, you have to somehow get rid of the dead space in the foreground without sacrificing too much resolution and IQ. You either accomplish this by moving closer, which may NOT be possible in railfanning, or crop out more foreground, as Brent said. Either way, they aren't bad shots. Someone just wasn't happy with the overall balance I guess.
A No.1 wrote:Did something change? Last time I looked I saw 2 Portrate shots up there Maybe I was drinking.
You were definitely drinking. They were always horizontal shots and I wondered what you were talking about when I read your post.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimthias/
GRHC - you know every night I can imagine he is in front of his computer screen sitting in his underwear swearing profusely and drinking Blatz beer combing the RailRoadFan website for grammatical errors.
Maybe I was drinking. 
