I joined POE and uploaded several photos.  Whats going on ?  no complaints about the photos suffering from limited dynamic range or an over strong anti-aliasing filter, and my JPEG's are not over compressed !

What I mean is that I use a well known web site with a lot of camera based groups, and I have had enough !!  I may have spent years with an interest in the technical side but...... now I want photography for fun !  All too often opinion was presented as fact, disagree and bitter fighting resulted.  I have quit the groups.  I do not care anymore if someone has more pixels than me, or they pay more for a lens / camera than a small car.

With POE I have found photos that are great to look at for the subject interest.  In trying to plan days away POE has given me a problem !  I have found so many interesting places that I will have to start cutting down on the growing list of "where to go" !!

 Thanks to all the kind people who have made me welcome here, and helped with uploading problems !  I look forward to meeting more of you. 

You're dead right Mick!  Cameras of the POE members range from inexpensive point and shoot to fairly top end SLR's and all are treated the same.,...it's the image content that matters and if you like what you have taken that is the crux, if others compliment it that just adds the icing. As i have said before it boost the photographic ego. Irrespective of equipment there are some damn good photographers within the membership. Let's just hope we can keep submitting and praising

You are so right Dave.  I really don't care if everything is "technically" correct in any photograph.  If I like the way it was taken, or the  colours or the subject or whatever I'll say so!

All that stuff Mick was talking about flew right over the top of my head.  As far as I am concerned it is not important!  (Whoops I'll get into trouble now! lol)

I am so impressed that so many photographers are prepared to take pictures of Beautiful England and share them with the rest of us (who probably use point and shoot cameras ourselves, lol).

Ladies....you can put 5 people in front of a scene and give them identical cameras and you will get 5 different images.....as I put in a post somewhere before 'Point & shoot or SLR, it’s the initial vision that counts and how your eye interprets that vision' as long as YOU are happy with result. The higher up the scale you go, the more 'twiddly knobs and buttons' you get but the one button you will probably all cameras is P for program...which effectively turns a top of the range SLR into a point and shoot. I tend to use my SLR in manual mode a lot, but that is how I was brought up. My first cameras, Praktica L, Zorki4 Olympus OM1 were all manual. So keep uploading pictures whatever you may think of them and wait for the praise to come. It won't happen with every image but it will happen, and when does you will get such a buzz...

Many years ago a top fashion photographer, I forget his name, pretended to use a light meter because 'it looked good in front of the client' He would look at the sky than at the very basic diagrams in the film packet and if the sky was cloudy he would set his camera to whatever the packet suggested. 'After all' he said, 'The technicians at Kodak can't be too far out'. And he ran a very succesful photo business.... 

Brilliant comment from Mick initially to start the thread, and then members are in agreement? POE must be doing something right eh?

That's the power of POE...

Dave, a quick question for you, or perhaps anyone with a long memory regarding photography :

Why was it part of my job to visit David Williams Ltd Glasshouse Yard London ?

You have in effect given the answer Dave !