Your pet peeve(s) when viewing pics?

[Bryn]

When images appear too dark, or if there's lack of consideration regarding the rule of thirds...

 

[greatgrandma]

I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but when I was trying to figure out how some underexposed 35mm slide film photos could be made more 'seeable' I changed them to black and white and increased the contrast. Then I could see what was there much better. It does make things significantly grainier but if the image is important to understanding something, it is a reasonable trade-off.

I did this with some photos of my dad's from 1946 where he was photographing the way he had his mice in a coal mine in Pennsylvania for an experiment on whether the radiation from the sun would increase cancer rate. He had his mice in lead cages in garbage cans in the mines. I didn't quite understand how this worked until I 'fixed' his photos

Dad demonstrating at the top of the mine

lead cages in the mine

Maybe it isn't that much better, but I hate the pinkish color of the color photo and it distracts me.

 

[Ltdave]

My biggest peeve is under- and over-exposure, especially under.
Most of the basic editors can easily correct it to bring a shot to a viewable
state of recognition, but many don't seem to care or give consideration
to how others may see a picture.

This doesn't come up much in photography-centric places like here,
but on the intarwebz in general, it's a voodoo chicken of complacency
that says 'I just wanna post it and I know what it is and I LOVE IT,
so if you don't see it then it's not for you so you can just go away, m'kay?'

So, I just say to myself, 'M'kay, I'ma gonna move out. You failed.'

as you probably have seen, i shoot a semi-pro hockey team. im using L glass on my 5D3 and 5D4. ive invested because i want great images over and above some good images (although i still seem to miss focus every now and again but i digress)...

one guy who's been taking pictures at the games almost as long as i have (NOT for the team but for the "...i just wanna post it...") and while i dont know what exact lens he has but its probably a 75-300 esque lens on a crop body Nikon. we all know that under the BEST circumstances those lenses, on the long end are probably f5.6 or f6.3. all things being equal (SS and ISO) those images are being created 2 to 3 stops UNDEREXPOSED. then he shares all 400+ on the some of the team's fan pages. if theyre not too far underexposed, theyre often blurry or the composition is just bad. another mutual friend has gotten a similar set up on a Canon. i tried to explain to him that if he used even Microsoft Photo Viewer, theres a rudimentary editing program there, so he can pop some contrast, and correct for some lighting issues. NEITHER of them do anything to make their photos look better and NEITHER cull them at all. i cant even look at them anymore....

so i will now get OFF my High Horse because I was once like them. didnt know what exactly i was doing but i guess the difference is i was willing to look into it more.


PS i shot a game tonight. about 427 photos. edited to 65

 

[greatgrandma]

That's quantity over quality. Better to have it reversed.

I think what is different about us (if I can include myself) is that we know what a good photo looks like. We (and I mean me) may not know exactly why I am having trouble or what to do about it, but we don't like the bad pictures that are out of focus (because we got the focus wrong) or exposed wrong. We can get over the excitement of taking a picture and look at it to see whether it shows something that we want to save.

The slides that we took back in the day came in a box. We would take the box and put the slides in a stack loader, in order of the little numbers on the cardboard mount, and project them on a wall or someplace and write down on a piece of paper what the slide showed and evaluate the quality (E, VG, G, F, P).

My mother once said that my dad kind of lost interest if there wasn't anything to take a picture of, and she felt that she and I had an 'eye' to figure out what would make a good picture more than he did. She said if the picture was pointed out to him, his picture would be better than ours, because he had better equipment and knew how to use it better.

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There is something else that really bugs me other than crooked and bad color, and that is reflections. Since I am often shooting through a window like in a car, any reflections really spoil a picture for me. A sunny day is a nightmare because my clothing reflects on the glass. Ideally I should wear all black but in the summer that's not too comfortable.

 

[Capn Jack]

Since I am often shooting through a window like in a car, any reflections really spoil a picture for me. A sunny day is a nightmare because my clothing reflects on the glass. Ideally I should wear all black but in the summer that's not too comfortable.

A polarizing lens can be a great help with reflections because reflected light is polarized parallel to the plane of whatever reflected it. It isn't a panacea because vehicle windows often contain materials that polarize light causing unwanted patterns and colors in whatever you are trying to image. So we exchange one distraction for another one.