And lets not forget that voting has been extended to the 30th! It may still say the 28th on the main contest page, but that is no longer true. If you haven't done so yet, you can still go ahead and cast your vote.

1st - 12 2nd - 19 3rd - 7

Quote - So if I substitute your pixels for bricks what you are telling me is there are more bricks in a ten foot high wall than an eight foot high wall.  Yep,  suppose there is, but the number of bricks per square foot is still the same.

As I read it, the number of "bricks" is not the same because the size of the wall stays constant. That's the area of the sensor array. More pixels means you are building a wall the same size, but with smaller bricks (the individual sensor elements). And the smaller you make the bricks in a wall, the more apparent the mortar filling the gaps will become when you look at that wall. It may not be a very scientific - or even accurate - analogy, but it's the one I'll try out if someone ever asks me to explain this stuff. :-D Besides, in any comparison of image quality possible changes in noise reduction methods built into the camera would have to be taken into account, not just the MP difference. And I soooo have no idea how much that was changed from the 350D to the 400D. :-D

A beautiful message, Tom. Happy and joyfull days to all of you.

Could be just me, but I think the lense flare may be just a bit too much in the center, splittling the image almost verticaly as it is now. It's pretty much vying for attenttion with the rest of the image. As I see it that might be more of a problem than the colors. Perhaps a different angle for the lense flare would work better?

When it comes to frames, the first thing that comes to my mind is this: A friend of mine once had an empty picture frame mounted on his wall - and in the middle of the frame he had pinned a hand-written note to the wall that read "freedom can only exist within a framework" (loosly translated from German). It may be an equally esoteric thought as the question that started this topic, but what it means to me is that you need to know who you are, and what you are all about. That is the framework - not the viewfinder. If cropping an image can bring out more of what an image means to you I am all for it, but when you look through the viewfinder you are still using your own eyes, your own perception - and that is something very personal. Do I use the viewfinder to compose an image? No, not at all. Cropping - or "framing" - an image is something I do afterwards, in the hopes to make everyone else see what I saw. But that is about it. I shoot what I see, and I have to live with the results. But, as always, that's just me and my two tiny coins. :-)

Very nice image, Kort. :-) Here's my take on messing it up completely. :-D

I just bought those angling gloves, and my first impression is very good. The green and white parts are fleece, while the gray parts are some sort of neoprene. On both hands the tip of thumb and index finger can be slid of and fixed in position with those round velcro pads. I doubt I'll have a chance to run them through a real test before the weekend, but just for kicks I held my hand out the car window while driving at about 80kph / 50mph (outside temperature ca. 0°C). I felt a lot of wind and cold through the gloves, but after a minute inside the car I noticed no difference between both hands any longer. I guess that means they kept in the warmth my body pumped back into my hand pretty well.

I wouldn't sell mine either, and pretty much for the same reasons as PeeWee. An additional reason for me is that I want to use it with a retro adapter one day (have the adapter, but using it needs bright light and right now is not the season for that). IIRC you have the 28-135mm? Are you sure you won't need something in the 18-28mm range? Might be better to keep the kit lense for now until you are certain - or decide to buy a dedicated wide-angle lense. But even if you want to sell it, your price may be too high. I think a lot of folks buy the XTi/400D with the kit lense, so I doubt there's much of a market for it - not to mention that it doesn't exactly have a shining reputation, which will push the re-sale price down even further. Maybe you should check out ebay to get a feeling for the current going price right now?

I need some new gloves too, and my research points me more and more to angling equipment. There are models were you can slip the tips of thumb and index finger out of the glove, but can keep wearing the rest. And those angling gloves are often designed to keep a solid grip on a fishing rod, which can't be so bad for holding a camera.

I don't have a genre either. Being still pretty new to photography I guess that's to be expected, but on the other hand I don't expect it to change much (if any) in the future. The constants for me are (i) nature, (ii) available light, and (iii) not changing the motive except for maybe brushing aside a few leaves or a single twig. I just like to shoot what I see if it captures my interest, be it throught lighting, textures, or something else. I'd say that, for me at least, that's not a question of a personal style I have chosen, but rather a question of how my personal perception relates to my photography.

Gosh! I can't believe one of my images made it into the selection. I thought it was pretty good for my standards, but to see it here... I feel quite honored. bows Congratulations to everyone else. Wonderful pictures all around. :-)

Lots of great photos. :-) But I must admit I wouldn't call many of those shots "abstracts". Guess it goes to show how much a lot of the terms we throw around here depend on individual perception. :-D

Quote - As for the language style, it depends on which seat in which room you occupy to hear the words.   A seat in a seminar will do just fine;  a photo chat with a casual passerby will not.

I have to disagree with you here. If I were sitting in a seminar this guy was holding (and he is a university teacher IIRC from his page) he would have lost me after the first two paragraphs. IMVHO teaching should be about making your point - and making everyone understand why you make that point, and your reasoning behind it. It should not be about waxing poetic on the point you are trying to convey, and thereby obfuscating your meaning. But your point about the Vietnam war images is a very good one. I had one of those "never more" posters on my living room wall for years, and I highly doubt I would have kept it there for so long if it had been a color picture. :-)

Quote - My question now is : with what I can use some sepia color tone or other? With landscape, I like to play with the b&w or color, but I don't see good in classical sepia, but in orange or red sepia tone, yes... Like some portrait of people, the color of skin is good in sepia and other is really bad,  What do you think ?

The easiest - if, perhaps, not the most helpful - answer is that you can use it any way you like, and whenever you feel like it. To explain: When I started with photography (not too long ago, mind you) I thought of photos as the visual equivalent of journalism - something that reports what is there. But the deeper I delve into it, the more I come to think of photos as the draft of a novelist's work, and think of postwork techniques as something like the editing a story. If it improves the work, then just do it. Sometimes sepia tones may help show what you want to show, other times they do not. But don't restrict yourself to thinking of any postwork technique being suited to just a certain kind of image. That would be like tying one hand behind your back. Just experiment and see where it leads you to. :-) For example: Here I took the liberty of using the original from your collage and added the sepia image on top of it as a new layer. Then I set the layers to multiply and lowered opacity to 50%. Without the sepia tone it would have taken another layer (at least) to arrive at this result, so it can certainly have its uses, even if you don't use the sepia effect on its own. :-)