[Leica] Mediocre Photographs

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2006-06-29-16:10:17 Brian Reid:
> I have a good friend whose only criterion for judging quality of 
> photographs is how well the skin tones are rendered on people who are not 
> Caucasian. Identity is race, race is skin color, and so the capture of a 
> person's identity (and hence the quality of the photograph) is entirely 
> determined by how accurately it renders the skin color. Nothing else 
> matters.

To choose a single arbitrary technical criterion like that and try to
put it in more Luggish terms, how about...

  - The quality of a picture is strongly correlated with the sharpness
    of focus of the near pupil of the primary human subject.

While such a singleminded, purely-technical rule is clearly absurd as
the sole means of judging photos, I must admit that when I'm editing (so
the whole available universe of pictures to choose from has already been
filtered through my compositional sense and seat-of-the-pants feel for
the right moment to push that damned button), an awful lot of pictures
seem to get to live or die based on the above rule.

Discuss.