Digital Photography School

This week in the Digital Photography School Forums

This is the first of a new type of post here at DPS and something that you’ll be seeing each weekend as we highlight some of what’s been going on in our forums in the previous week. It’s being written by one of our wonderful forum moderators - Nicole. Enjoy.

Last week’s assignment had forum members showing off their faces with the Self-Portrait assignment. Some people took silly portraits, some people showed off their serious side, and some people made us really look to see them reflected in a surface. We saw lots of creative ways to do self-portraits and saw some new forum members we hadn’t seen before and some long time members who had yet to show us their faces.

Assignments

This week’s assignment is the Beach and anything related to beach life. This assignment is our first assignment with our new mini-contest for forum members. The contest runs from Wednesday until the following Tuesday. At the end of the week, a winner will be picked (along with 2 honourable mentions) and the photos will be displayed on the blog during the weekend. Next week we will have our first winner. This week’s contest ends on Tuesday (July 17), and make sure to watch for next week’s assignment, Music.

This week’s poll

We also started a new weekly poll to see what members would pick if they were only given 2 choices. Last week, we asked members: If you could only choose one type of lens to shoot with, would you pick Primes or Zooms. The result was overwhelmingly zoom lenses with 78% of people choosing zooms. So why did so many people pick zooms?

Jargon said: “I prefer the zoom lenses just because I’d rather spend my time taking more pictures than changing lenses.”

Of course, some people still like the primes.

Thingy said: “If you had asked before I picked up my nifty fifty, I’d have sided with the versatile zooms. But I am totally into my fifty now. Sharp, Fast, Great DOF!”

This week, come vote on our new poll and tell us: If you could only shoot in colour or black and white, which would you choose? Don’t forget to tell us why.

Hot threads

Caption my photo!: Do you have a photo where you just can’t think of a title or you think that it needs a funny caption? This thread gives you the opportunity to do just that. Stop by and suggest a caption or contribute a picture of your own.

DSLR Lenses & Magnification: Point and shoot cameras often measure their zooms differently from DSLRs. This thread helps sort out some of the confusion about what focal length you need to get the amount of magnification you want.

Balloon Popping: We all love DIY projects that can help us with our photography. This week, forum member RandomConnections showed us how he created a rig using a disposable camera and some electronics equipment to put together a sound activated flash to take pictures of balloons as they popped.

Other threads to note

We’re up to “L is for…” in Saralonde’s alphabet series. So if you have a picture of something that starts with the letter L, make sure to join in. And don’t forget our weekly post-processing thread, “What Would You Do“, where you can show us how you would process this week’s photo.

Finally, don’t forget about July’s contest where 4 forum members will win Cam-Pods.

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