[Pavel]

Zig, I agree with you about the right, responsibility and trust. I am at a different (lower) stage of photographic development and my nature, my family, my education and most of my friends reinforced in me to think as a scientist. It is a usefull way of thinking for dealing with some problems and I am not knocking it. It is a real handicap when it comes to art and photography. The good part is that you pick up the technical stuff relatively easily. The handicap is that you travel "blind". You do not see, you are overly focused and excessively goal oriented. Look at the revealing discussions about where we are with regards to photography. Most of you are open to wide variety of sights and experiences, yet I seem to travel the narrow and blind path towards a goal. For me having a dialogue with you is valuable, as I hope through that I can learn to put some of my native thinking aside and use some of yours. I have been a snapshooter, but I feel I am making the first tentative steps towards being a photographer. I would guess that upon inspection, hearing opinion of others, even less experineced and gifted photographers like me can benefit you all in some way that you may not see until it happens and so discussion I beleive is beneficial to all of us.

Mathew, this is where my response to you comes in. I do not think that bashing anybody is constructive and so I agree with you that review comments hould not be negative in tone or intent. Such discourse is not helpful and I did not come across it on this site. I am not sure that I agree with you about not accepting negative content. Perhaps you intended that statement differently than I interpret it. I think that in order for me (and perhaps us) to learn, it is useful as you say to hear how the photo makes you feel (did I understand correctly?) and to hear what is right with my photo. However, I also find it instructive to be told what in the view of the reviewer works less well. This opinion may be right or wrong, but serves as a flag for me to consider and to make me think about it. At the end I may accept the suggestion from a reviewer or not, but either way I am a winner, because I gave a thought to an issue which I did not think about before or I revisit an issue which I may have thought about, but from a different angle. I think a reviewer benefits greatly too. From my own experience, I can say that I learned a lot thinking through why some photos work for me and others do not or how to make a given photo work better for me. I learned from doing this and I think it is an amazingly effective learning tool. I do not know if it would at your level, but I think I learned a lot reviewing photos of people with even less experience than I do.

Thank you both Zig and Mathew for commenting. It is useful for me to understand your views. Pavel