You'll find plenty of people who will complain about some of the arbitrary "standards" that RP has for photos; I'm not nearly as vocal as some, but I certainly have my complaints about it. There's a
great editorial about one of the RP-equivalent sites for aviation spotting, which is basically about some people are losing sight of the fun of the hobby by being so intent on taking photos to upload to those sites.
The same is true for Railpictures. I think it's nice that they have some standards¹, but I've taken a few pictures that I
know are good pictures, and I've submitted them to RP and had them rejected. After a while, I realized I didn't care; the photo is good whether or not it's uploaded to RP, and while it's not going to see the same level of traffic by being up on my own site or rrpicturearchives, it's not going to hurt me at all. I've taken to looking it at it as RP's loss when they reject my photos, and that's helped me in that when I go out, I take the photo
I want, not the photos I think RP would want.
I happen to have high standards for my own shots, and I end up "throwing away" a LOT of the shots I take (some because they're not good, some because I usually shoot in bursts), but I don't feel driven to take a "RP shot" every time I hit the shutter release.
Anyhow,
these are the half-dozen shots I've gotten accepted at RP. Two of actually surprised me when they were accepted; see if you can guess which ones!
¹ I've seen a couple of shots on RP that have made me wonder "what the f--- were the screeners thinking?", but all in all, there are a lot of nice shots there. I compare it to an open-upload site like rrpicturearchives, where there are a ton of, frankly, crap shots, with some real gems mixed in there. There are certain people who upload only good shots to rrpicturearchives, and there are some (lots?) of people who dump all of their photos there, regardless of how bad they may be. I've seen a lot of photos where the photographer has upload a photo & put in the information about the locomotive (which I may be looking for good pictures of), but the photo is dark and the locomotive is on the far end of a train, where you can barely see it. I've seen lots of way-too-dark photos, lots of blurry photos, lots of overexposed photos and lots of photos with poor lighting. I happen to think that RP's standards are a bit too high, and they end up rejecting lots of good photos for silly reasons, but it's MUCH more enjoyable to look through the new photos there than at rrpicturearchives.
