It's finally becoming Fall here in Texas The leaves are just beginning to turn and I'll hopefully be able to get a lot of pictures Was able to snag my first shot of some fall color last night:



_{If you could let me know if this shot didn't show up in your message centers that would be great I'm pretty sure they have that problem fixed but just to make sure}

I wanted to give you guys just a few updates. First of all, just so you know, I'm going to let my subscription run out for now. It's up in a week and I'm not on deviant enough to justify paying for it. Maybe when I get some more free time, but as of now work and school are taking up almost all my time. Also I'm getting a little burned out with deviantART. And, from my experience, it seems like deviantART is more of a popularity contest anymore than anything else. I'm not trying to annoy anybody, but there's been quite a few times I've been on the popular page and there will be a picture that is honestly not all that good (and I'd rather not get into the discussion of "what is art"). But basically everytime I see one of those shots, I check and the person is extremely popular on here. It seems as though sometimes (not all the time) some of these extremely popular people can upload basically anything and it will make it to the top page in a matter of hours. I'm not going to name anybody, and I'm trying to write my thoughts down without offending anyone...but in comparison I've seen some shots that just blow me away, and have basically no views at all, it makes me sad.
In an almost complete contrast, I think a lot of us, (especially me) probably put too much emphasis on how many favorites some of our work receives. Is one piece of art better than another because it has 1,500 and the other has 20? Not necessarily. Most of the time it just means that the first has received much more exposure. I've almost started looking at the view to favorite ratio to find out how much people like a certain picture, such as one of mine:



This one has over 3,500 views and 78 favorites (at the time of writing this). That's just about 1 favorite for every 45 views. I have no clue how it got that many views, but my point is that it's somewhat interesting to look at that ratio, rather than just views, or just favorites. So if you might be tired of your work not getting much attention, don't worry. Just keep working at it and as long as you keep trying, your work will be seen


Another thing that tends to bother me is how we tend to choose what pictures we look at based almost solely on the thumbnail. I know this is really unavoidable, that's just the way it is, but I have seen a direct result of how many views one of my pictures get versus how much detail you can see and how dramatic the thumbnail is. I've been trying to look at every picture I receive in my deviantWATCH at full size just for that reason. You never know what you might be missing!

Again I'd like to emphasize that I'm not trying to start any arguments, these are my personal feelings about this site right now. And if I came off as stuck up, I apologize, that was not my intent. I'm curious if you guys tend to agree, or disagree with me, and why? I kind of doubt anyone will actually read this far, but if you did, yay!