ohhh... I really don't know what to say guys... I just never thought mine could be the gallery of the month! You know, I still have a lot to learn and I still struggle with almost every picture I take, but this kind of reward from this community so full of great artists shall work as an "afterburner" for me pushing me to renew my efforts to produce something better. So... thank you very much Doug (dBgrafix) for this honour and thank you all guys for your extraordinary support!!! have a great day! (mine IS already) :D Nasht

I dont think there was anything personal behind GiMI53 post and least of all an hidden insult. Nobody here I think is judging logiloglu's art: we all agree he's one of the best photographers around here. But his works (in the hot 20) were a perfect example to explain the problems connected with this system. In my opinion a hot 40 instead of the hot 20 would not change anything as the ranking system would be exactly the same. None of my picture has ever been in the hot 20 but I've been many times in the "last week in the gallery" thread. Now it comes my question: why do we need such a thread if we can make the top 20 work? I think the point of the hot 20 should be exacly the one of the above mentioned thread... Am I wrong?

my two cents about it (please forgive my english): I think the "top 20 thing" is right and i works well, but in my opinion is the beahviour of the people here in RR that is a bit strange. I mean, I have another online gallery that is much more "free" for judgement. Let me explain: I think here on RR there's a sort of gentlemen's agreement that says "do not say bad things on other people pictures". I dunno why but I truly feel that kind of sensation when reading people's comments about my work or on other's one. And I do the same! I mean sometimes I feel "forced" not to express my personal opinion on an image just because it would be "not friendly enough for RR"... And so, when I dont like a picture I just avoid commenting on it. But I really think that this is wrong! Because I, among others, would need to have the bad things pointed out on my work in order to improve... otherwise... where would be the point in showing them? Just to read a bunch of "excellent" or "great shot" or whatever without any other comment? But a community is made of people and the behaviour of a community is made by the behaviour of its members! So my suggestion is to change our way of commenting by using all the "tools" we got here from ugly to excellent and by pressing the vote button for the most captivating, original, unique or technically perfect pictures we see around here. That way the top 20 should start to work again. I don't know how many people shall follow my line, but I'm telling you I'm starting right now. ;) Thanks to GiMi53 for putting the issue out. It made me reflect on this point...

First of all, thanks everybody for taking the time to look at my work. And for your nice words too!
:)

About the fonts... I really had an hard time with them. You see, Flash has one big problem with fonts: it just applies "antialiasing" to everything, fonts included, making them very hard to read unless you're using very large characters. But I didn't want text to be "important" in my site (there's very little of it) because of the subject.
So I had to learn how to use pixel fonts in order to prevent flash from blurring them. And that was another issue, as nobody seems to know how do they work perfectly, I've lost a lot of time doing reserch and I've read many articles and tutorials but the informations I got did not work for me.
Anyway, I learned how to use them at last... so if anybody will ever have a problem with them... ask me! ;)

So, back to the answer, I was forced to use pixel fonts and because they are working only in fixed sizes (like 8px) I had to "chose"... that size.
The result is a very sharp small character that sometimes can be hard to read, but I can assure you that normal text would have been much worse.

Hope that explains

thanks again!

*For DHolman: thanks for your advice. It's been corrected! ;)

so many beautiful shots! and I've got double-dose! Thanks Misha! :)

well I tried to find it out and... it seems I just cant vote the images if I access them from the top 20. But if I go straight to someone's gallery and open the image from there... I can "vote" for it. I dunno if this is intentional but it's quite annoying. :)