Category Archives: competition
August Winner – September Begins!
Ahhh, month-end. Contest announcement days! As most know, this is the time when the previous month’s winner is typically announced and the next month theme is opened up for entries. Today is no exception… First up, congratulations go out to Evelyn B. for her winning metal-themed image: Not only is this a perfectly-lit image, but the details are spot on, and it totally fits the theme of Metal! Congrats to Evelyn B. from Flickr – please email me your contact information so I can submit to Red River Paper for you to get the pack of Pearl Metallic Paper (which … Continue reading
Free Copy of Photoshop Lightroom
Over $2000 in prizes!
With April in the books a new winner has been determined. It was a really tough call as all the entries this month were deserving, and each could have easily been considered a winner given the theme, the composition, creativity, and treatment. All in all, the cream really has risen to the top, and I am seeing some really impressive quality in the images this month. Okay, enough dancing around the subject. The winner is: Bryan F Seriously, I don’t know if I can keep doing these contests, because every month the decision gets more and more difficult to make. … Continue reading
Contest News and Announcements
Congratulations and kudos go out to the winner for the February contest – the theme was Height and the winning image came from Sue90ca! To see all the images submitted for February, check out the thread here with all the images. Some really great ones were included, and as always, it was a tough decision. Nevertheless, Sue90ca’s “Crayons” was selected as the winner. You can see the rest of Sue’s portfolio on her Flickr stream here… Before anyone asks, the March contest info is not up on FLickr yet, but I should have an announcement for that later on tonight. … Continue reading
December Winner!
The trumpets sound! The chorus rings, and the internet shall stop and take notice! Why you ask? We have a winner for the December Giveaway! I am happy to announce that the winner of the December Giveaway Bonanza is none other than: Frank Sammut! Frank’s shot of a childs hand, offering up a gift perfectly symbolized the concept of giving, and his blurred bokeh of the holiday theme in the background was just beautiful! He’s got some great work on his Flickr page too, so stop by and check it out and tell him congrats! Congratulations to Frank for winning … Continue reading
Favorite Photos of 2009
One of the resolutions I had wanted to do was publish a “Best of” series from the Flickr group each month. That did not come to pass, but I did want to take some time to share some of my favorites of the past year with you here. Not much to say in the way of prefacing these, other than to say that I liked them. Whether for the technical quality, the compositional quality, the message, the colors, or the perspective – they stood out for me. Feel free to visit the Flickr group pool and peruse for your own … Continue reading
37 out of 52
Can anyone guess the significance of the post title right off the bat? Any takers at all? For those that could, cool! For those that can’t, 37 is a reference to the last podcast for 2009! Episode #37 (Longevity of Lenses) is now available for your listening pleasure in iTunes and with the folks hosting the show directly on the web at Personal Life Media. It might be an hour or so actually before the show is available for download on iTunes, so hold off for a little there before downloading – you might get the previous episode! It does … Continue reading
Last Minute Gift Guide
Is your shopping done? Mine isn’t – I am going to be braving the stores tomorrow for some last minute ideas I had that popped in my head over the weekend. Unfortunately for Tracy, she is not a photographer, so camera-related items are not really an option. But, if you are running out of time and ideas, rest assured, I’ve got a few more here for you today. Fair warning though, because when you’ve waited this long to shop, the sticker prices for items are generally in the higher end rather than the lower end. (You may recall that I … Continue reading
Episode #36 – The End is Near!
Okay, the end isn’t near, but the end of the year is near, and it’s time to start doing wrap-ups all over the internet and other publications. Heck, even Time Magazine has a photos of the year, as did Rangefinder, and many blog authors are doing the same. So, in the interests of always “doing something different”, I am inviting everyone that listens to the podcast and reads the blog to share your own thoughts of 2009 in the comments. Here’s the questions that I always think about at the end of the year: What was my best photo? What … Continue reading
I’m dreaming of an HDR Christmas
Last night I got the bug to try something I’d seen before – the classic Christmas-y look with a score of music and a shallow depth of field. It was straightforward enough and after putting a piece of sheet music on the piano, and trying it that way, wasn’t getting the drop off in depth-of -field as I had hoped for. So, I took a different approach and put the music sheet flat on a table, knowing the dof would drop off that way, with the foreground out of focus and receding off in the background too. So, the second … Continue reading
December Giveaway News
A few days late, but the year-end giveaway is quite exciting as there is just a ton of good stuff going into this giveaway. Here’s the inside skinny on what the winner is going to walk away with in December: A free copy of the “Within the Frame”, the wildly successful and great book donated by David DuChemin! A free copy of “Visionmongers”, the latest book from none other than David Duchemin! A free copy of Photomatix, the software known for its HDR processing, donated by the folks over at HDRSoft! A free 16″x20″ gallery wrap of a print of … Continue reading
How Low Can You Go?
In episode #34 of Learning Digital Photography, we look at the subject of low light photography. In these shooting circumstances, you often need to drop your shutter speed pretty low, while shooting with apertures that are relatively open, and high ISO’s in order to get the scene with enough light. Whether you are shooting night photography, concert photography, or foggy weather, these are all things to look at and think about. To help shed some light on the subject (get it? ), we talked to Becky Thomas (aka BecThomasPhoto on Twitter) on the show. A great conversation, and lots was … Continue reading
Freaky Friday Follow-up
After a freaky Friday yesterday filled with podcast-associated technical difficulties including broken URL’s, missing media, and quieter than normal audio, the idea of writing a blog post for the day completely slipped my mind. So, the awaited hardware review for the week got pushed back a little, as well as the announcement of the winner of the Scott Kelby Digital Photography book, volume 3! The former is a little to late to push out on a Saturday, but the latter is accomplished easily enough, so I turned to my trusty Random Number Generator website (which I learned about from friend-of-the-blog … Continue reading
Photo Framing Follow-up
After the blog post on Wednesday, and the number of comments received, I thought that the next podcast would be well served to discuss the idea behind matting and framing in more detail. As luck would have it, that podcast just went live earlier this afternoon! You can catch the podcast over at the Personal Life Media site here: Learning Digital Photography Here’s the Show Notes: In this latest episode of Learning Digital Photography, the Grand Prize winner from the September $500 giveaway is announced, and the October contest opens up – ready for your entries. The theme this time … Continue reading
Tuesday Top Five Nuggets
In lieu of a software review, today instead just a couple news nuggets for you. First up, the finalists of the $500 giveaway have been determined. These six finalists are being considered to win a pretty impressive package of stuff including a Thinktank Photo Multimedia Bag System and a complete set of the Topaz Labs Photoshop Bundle. View the finalists gallery here. Next up, a recommendation: Even if you aren’t a subscriber to the Rangefinder Magazine (although you should be), you can read the current issue online here, (it’s a PDF download) which includes in the most recent issue an … Continue reading
Five Elements of Control: #5 Composition
You knew it had to come back to this, right? I know, everyone is screaming by now “But Jason, you’ve talked about the Rule of Thirds until the cows literally came home!” Truth be told though, most people think about compositional positioning with their subject matter. While it’s true that subjects are ideally placed on a hot spot or along one of the gridlines in the ROT grid, but you can break the rules too, ya know! I say, put anything you want on a grid spot. Or don’t have a specific point of interest! Make the subject of your … Continue reading
Covering the Photo Beat
In the latest release of the LDP podcast, a shorter show this week as I prep for some other ventures, but there’s still enough material to really sink your teeth into. To start things off, Leica released two new cameras in a synchronized announcement including a full frame ranger finder camera for $6995 and a crop factor camera with 12 MP for just under $2K which will release around the holidays. More info on both cameras here The other big photo news of the week comes to us courtesy of Apple, with the latest updates to iPods not only by … Continue reading
Wacom Winner!
For those of you that don’t follow the twitter news and stuff, you may not know that I cut a finger pretty badly late last week. A visit to the doctor on Thursday pretty much confirmed that I needed to keep from using that hand for at least 24-48 hours. This meant no keyboard or computer use. SO Friday, when I started to disobey the doctor (shame on me!), the spousal unit found out and intervened. Since then, we had a nice little weekend trip to Santa Fe (only about 6 hours away from Denver) with some friends. We took … Continue reading
The first ever Comment Contest!
After a short (and unexpected) break from blogging yesterday, here’s a Friday Free-For-All for you! Here’s where reader input is going to be what makes or breaks the content – that’s right, I am putting it all on the reading audience. You can link to your own site in the comments, and the “Comment Luv” plugin will show the most recent post for fellow bloggers too. Here’s what the content topics are to chose from (you can pick one, two, three, or all of the topics to address in your comment): What are your favorite iPhone/iTouch applications (for photography)? Who … Continue reading
Post #501: Hardware Review – Thinktank Photo Multimedia Bag
As you may recall from the video announcement on Friday’s post #500 – the giveaway product for September includes the newest bag system from Thinktank Photo. You read that right, it’s a bag system! Totaling $320 in value retail the bags include the following:
Post #500: Celebrating a Milestone!
Not sure where to begin really – this is all kind of surreal, because I really didn’t think that this milestone would see me where things are today with the blog. Needless to say, the blog has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, so thanks to everyone who’s made that possible. Without further ado, here’s the big news (via YouTube video, so feed readers, stop in and get the news by taking a few minutes out of your day for this exciting video news bulletin!): For the data hounds, here’s a rundown of some of the stats for a snapshot of … Continue reading
Post #498: A few shots from the Photo Walk
You’d think these would be shots from the Scott Kelby Photo Walk, but that’s only half right. Ever since the first photo walk last year in Golden, CO…several of us kept the concept cooking with regular meet-ups (through www.meetup.com, a great place to organize get-togethers for any type of group, not just photography). Anyway, this meetup group has been getting together on a regular basis (monthly to semi-monthly depending on season)…and we had our August photo walk back at historic Golden CO (in honor of last years Scott Kelby photowalk that was held there). Since I am on the subject … Continue reading
And the winner is…
Ladies and Gentlemen, Here today, I am happy to announce that the winner for the OnOne Software Plugin Suite Giveaway has been decided. So, without further ado, please give it up for Pete Petersheim! Pete submitted the following image to the LDP contest thread, which got the ultimate nod: Click the picture to go to his Flickr thread, wish him congratulations on a job well done. Note there are two images in his Flickr thread, a cropped version (which was entered) and the full-size one. I think that regardless of which he had entered, it would have won the day. … Continue reading
Reviews, Contests, and Blog Notes
Lots to cover today on the blog so I am going to get right to it. First up, I’m trying to maintain the schedule of hardware reviews, so rather than go into detailed analysis, I am just sharing an abbreviated review here today on the Canon 28-135mm lens. Also up on todays blog, the OnOne Software giveaway finalists have been announced! Last up, a few administrative things to address. So, without further ado, let’s get started: The 28-135mm Review The luck of this review is due to the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk. I had been hearing good things about this … Continue reading
Contests and Giveaway News
Lots to cover today, so rather than banter, let’s get to the news about all the contest stuff going on: The Comment Contest Talk about a huge success – had enough feedback and ideas in this one post to really get some great creative ideas in play for the coming months for the blog – after the re-design! Some lucky winner will be announced tomorrow (I am writing this on Sunday, while comments are still being accepted, so a winner cannot be announced right now.) Win a Wacom Giveaway The Learning Digital Photography giveaway thread over on Flickr has seen … Continue reading →