Hello Marshmallowpie, As you have always been so kind with your comments about my pictures in the past, I thought I might add my thoughts about your Ratings topic. I have mentioned in the past that I have quite an extensive experience as a photographic judge so I feel reasonably qualified to take part. First of all my approach to being invited to comment on peoples work (which I always considered an honour) was to always look for what I liked about the image and not what I didn't like. I usually had to give it marks out of 20 so I would mentally divide it into three unofficial groups. Because the photographer at least took the trouble to prepare and enter a photograph I would give it 6 marks. For quality of image I would give it extra marks from 1-7 and for impact I would award it marks from 1-7. So if you entered a nicely composed image with nice tones and reasonably it was interesting you would get approx 15-16 marks. However, if you entered a photograph which didn't fulfill all the above criteria but had great impact, then I tore up my guidelines and gave it a twenty. But can we get this ratings thing into perspective? Renderosity provide a fantastic site of enourmous interest where we are given the opportunity to view (and perhaps) comment on other peoples photographs and vice versa. But hey, it's not a matter of life or death. Nobody's job is hanging on some adverse comments. It's all great fun so let's keep it that way. Or does this all suck?