The best-laid plans of mice and men...

This photo contains ten cunningly-disguised mistakes. See if you can spot them all. Answers on page 94.

-- Struan Gray (struan.gray@sljus.lu.se), May 10, 2001

Answers

But Struan, three cunningly disguised mistakes are wriggling in plain view! :)

(but of course, in all seriousness, I would never consider a baby to be a mistake! just injecting some crude humor! sorry, I had to do it :)

-- edward kang (ekang@cse.nd.edu), May 12, 2001.

Ah, but I am only responsible for two of those mistakes. The photographic ones are 100% mine :-)

This is a bad photo, if judged by the standards of conventional baby portraiture. As a record of what the day was like it's the one I like best, and it serves nicely as a warning for others.

-- Struan Gray (struan.gray@sljus.lu.se), May 14, 2001.

1) blurry item in foreground, probably a rattler;
2) horrible lighting, i.e. shadows on faces;
3) vignetting, probably wrong lens shade;
4) hand out of frame;
5) view point, i.e. looking straight down;
6) boring background;
7) excessive contrast/muddy/poor development?;
8) poor composition, i.e. centered;

I just love how the one in the middle is holding the arm of the one to the left. Extremely cute!

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@alaska.net), May 14, 2001.

Here's my ten, before I say tony's

1.weird thing at bottom center 2. viginetting 3. blanket corner in top left 4. uneven lighting 5. shadows of babies' heads 6. one baby looking away 7. viewpoint -- straight down 8. bad expressions 9. composition sucks 10.

-- Michael K. Goode (mike@mikegoode.com), May 14, 2001.

The first mistake is photographing babies. The next nine mistakes are irrelevant if you never photograph babies!

-- Todd Frederick (fredrick@hotcity.com), May 14, 2001.

That's not vignetting (at least, at the bottom), that's my tripod legs! Todd is sort of right, in that the real mistake was to try and photograph three babies at once, particularly on a day when my two were downright crabby.

I like this as an anti-portrait, and see it as a photograph about photography. I have defect-free pictures of babies, but there's not much point in showing them here, since to everyone else they're just another random kid. This one does more, even if it only raises a sympathetic smile from other photographing parents.

-- Struan Gray (struan.gray@sljus.lu.se), May 15, 2001.