yes, I received a " Friendly Reminder " message saying that : While we understand the need for watermarks on photographs, if you choose to use your website url as your watermark, we cannot allow those photos to be shared on our forums." My watermark is my website address, so now when posting photos I must erase the .com that comes after dervissdesign.

Photography: If you are in NYC and you want to visit the Empire State Building and you have a map. It will not be difficult for you to find the place. And if you don’t have a map, you can drive for days and still not find the building. Is the person with the map a better driver? I am not a good photographer. I use extremely simple methods (the map). I use one light, one tripod and the camera on automatic for the same shots every time. Plating: I have been told that I have a unique style. I don’t know what that means. I do find it interesting that all food by nature have God’s given colors and geometry. So I try to take advantage what nature has to offer. There are many plating styles which I don’t practice, for many reasons, mostly because I don’t have the time to perform intricate carving and stacking. I don’t have the patience to take food to a presentation plate, arrange, assemble, move, sculpt, tweezer -----. compose, compose and compose---tasting menu style ----- then relocate the food on a serving plate, reheat and serve. The dishes that I take pictures with are the same dishes that go on the dinner table. I think there is no style that will please all, which is very interesting to me. I learn a lot from good comments and very critical comments. I find age differences, culture, geography, etc. have a lot to do with perception of and preference to aesthetics. After all, if you go to a fine arts museum, chances you will hate at least half of the “art” there. Sleevendog, everything you have said has been said to me by more than one person more than once. I have no disagreement with your thesis. I can see that you have some background in artistic training. I certainly do not think you are being critical at all. You have made valid observations from your perspective and I do appreciate them. I assure you each time I create some dishes, I will be thinking of your comments before I click. The important issue in discussion here is really for those who have some degree of photophobia. Taking good food pictures and creating good plating while not that important, but if you want to add additional joy to the eating experience, it is much easier and cheaper than you realize. A while back, I decided to send a couple of pictures and entered in a cooking competition sponsored by a major publication and some food companies. I was immediately qualified just by the pictures I sent. During the actual cooking, the appliance which was given to me (All finalists cook with the same appliances) failed. I was unable to fully execute my recipe. However, the picture of my plating was used in the centerfold by the publication and also the Facebook advertisement for the sponsoring food company. Then recently I entered another competition sponsored by a food forum. I won the competition just by the photos I submitted. I did post those pictures here in this forum. Those were a lot of fun to brag to my friends and family. And the equipment used for the photos? As I said nothing more than one light bulb, and a broken kitchen container. Lighting is very important, for instance, the same picture of the artistically plated dish up thread by Sleevendog would look totally different if it were taken with better lighting; No shaking, no bad lighting, that is the “Map” to good photos even with cheap cameras. Just do it. Plate, click, plate, click ------- Small investment in learning time for a life time of amazing food fun! dcarch

Once threads fall off the end of the index, they're pretty much toast. You can still find them on Google for awhile, and link to them, and sometimes even add to them, but once they're off the index they don't get back on. After awhile they're purged from the system too. The Internet Archive is way behind on its mission, and the Kitchens Forum moves so fast not all threads are sampled, but you can sometimes find really old threads on the wayback machine. You can start a new thread to give your comment.

Seems to be coming quite common. That happened with a thread started by Errant yesterday. It disappeared for everyone else, but she could still see it in the list. I'm not seeing the photo ones from earlier now either. If there's a problem with something posted it would be nice to get at least an email instead of *poof* gone since we're looking for clarification. - assuming Houzz pulled it.