I spent a couple hours this morning uploading several photos to RP.net. I wasn’t expecting them all to make it, but I certainly wasn’t expecting them ALL to be rejected either!!! Here’s the message I got:
Now I’m sure some of these are really not that great photos (and I may re-submit some after re-cropping), but one of the photos I submitted recently that I thought wouldn’t make it is now #2 of my 30 photos! I’m still scratching my head on that one.
But, wait…I’m going to comment about that stuff…I’m suprised that Trains hasn’t blocked my membership over the last thread about that outfit and my tirade about the whole thing…
I looked at the photos and one thing that I saw is the color looks faded. Especialy the first few. They look milkey. Other than that they look good to me. Good Composure too.
I sure cannot understand why all of those were rejected. Most of the images I have seen on railpictures.net were of equal (or less) quality than yours. Sure, some are better, but lots are worse. Maybe you caught them on a bad day.
Fuzzy,
I think the people who accept/decline photos for railpictures dont get a constant grade of crack…some days they are accepting junk there, other, they reject really good photos…
Dont sweat the load…its their loss.
Congrats to you and Debbie…
any little fuzzies planned?
Love all of them. I am thinking about setting up a site where you can send your rejected photo’s and they will be put up with credits to the photographer and all. Now, you should still send your photo’s to railpictures.net, but this will be a way to have people view your work eve if you got rejected.
In the world of graphic images, the creators of such materials have to get used to rejections. Believe me I know how frustrating that can be. I submit some of my best paintings and illustrations and get the “Big R.” Ya never know what’s going on with the rejector. I have prospective clients calling my rep, who see my work in Illustrators Workbook, just to tell him why they won’t use my work. And it’s good stuff to boot.
Years ago, when I worked in the office of the railroad, I had a colleague say,“Face it Mitch, we’re railroaders. We have to learn to thrive on rejection.”
Those are really good pictures. Possibly the contrast was off on
a couple of the first ones,but they are still good shots.
I like Ed’s comment,I think that is, how they do things there;
I’ve had several ‘rejected’ from their site also.
And those rejected because of ‘bad angle’;now how are you
supposed to get a better angle,hang from the ‘catwalk’,or get
them at ground level where you would be trespassing.
Sometimes you wonder what would happen (legal considerations notwithstanding) if you were to pirate a picture off a site like that and submit it. Assuming they didn’t pick up on the fact that they already had the shot in their collection, it would be interesting to hear why they rejected it when they’d already accepted it once…
Could be, too, that you just aren’t in their good graces yet. I’ve seen too many instances in life where something was accepted because of who produced it, rather than what it was.
I’ve seen pictures just like those on Railpictures.net before. Who knows what their smoking today. Other than rrpicturearchives.net you could go to rr-fallenflags.org and send your pictures to George there. He knows a decent picture when he sees it.
I see no reason to consider these bad in any way. Composition is generally very good, jubject matter good, several are quite nice, including the crane–good “men at work” shorts along with the head-on switch move. And too dark? More like some are overexposed on a cloudy day to get the detail–what’s wrong with that? Good pix!
And congratulations Fuzzy and Debbie. May you have many happy anniversaries!
As for the first, I could see why the reviewer my have wanted a more tightly cropped composition, but to say “poor cropping” is a bit overboard, IMO. Actually I like the image’s contrast because the subject is sharp and the background is less noticeable, as it should be.
The second image has a good subject but has some distracting elements – the wires in the UL, the chimney in the background, and could be more tightly cropped in the right to eliminate the fence post. You might have gotten closer to the crane to avoid the foreground elements and make the distracting background elements relatively smaller.
The third is technically fine; maybe the reviewer just didn’t find it very interesting?
The fourth has the same “problems” as the first but the shadow lighting de-emphasizes the subject.
I guess the last appears out of the vertical.
I never thought railfans were that picky esthetically. Maybe this site is the first.
I consider most of the problems minor and fixable in Photoshop. Maybe you could fix them and resubmit?
It appears to me that the person (or persons) that are in charge of editing on that site, are obviously a bit narrow-minded in their view of what an “appropriate” photo is. They seem to take the concept of train photography a little too simplistically, as they appear to only be satisfied with photos that show a train, and ONLY a train. Which is pretty ridiculous. Photos showing the surroundings a bit can often times be the most interesting as they age. I think yours are perfectly acceptable, and the people running that site maybe need to take in a few art classes at their local university.
Server space is cheap now… Start your own site and do whatever you want.