Weekend Photography Challenge

[freezeframe03]

Why not make the Weekend Photography Challenge a regular Forum Topic so that it operates like the Weekly Assignment Forum Topic? I see that most people have trouble with posting photos in the current setup and they get posted in duplicate and triplicate or don't show up at all. My system always seems to want me to disable all my securities to add a photo in the comments. I'm not going to do that, so it's frustrating to not participate in a challenge that I'd like to participate in.

I would really like to see this changed...anyone else feel the same?

[junglebear]

Yes!

I've had so many problems uploading previously, I think it's mainly the first few times you post a picture, it has to be checked out to make sure it's publishable. But still, it would work much better in the weekly assignments section of the forum.

[i speak in math]

I would like to see a summary of the postings. Maybe a tidbit about why a few of them are good shots. What makes them a good shot and such. Why does the author like them.

[freezeframe03]

I've checked out last weekend's photos and it seems that people are loosing interest. There seem to be fewer posts. Or maybe it's just fewer attempts to post. So I guess we're not alone but others don't care enough to speak up? What a shame.

[Elvie]

Agree. I enjoy the challenges but it would be so much easier if it were a regular Forum Topic

[Darren Rowse]

Perhaps if I can give a bit of an explanation on why we started the weekend challenges on the blog.

The reason was simply that we wanted to do something for blog readers who didn't join the forum.

It might surprise people (it did for me) but I did a survey a year back of dPS readers and discovered that quite a few of our regular blog readers were not forum members and quite a few of our regular forum members were not blog readers. I dug a little deeper and discovered that some people just prefer one medium and not the other.

As a result there was a larger group of people who never saw, or wanted to see, the forum assignments. I decided to do an experiment and do an assignment of sorts on the blog - the first weekend challenge. I discovered a lot of people wanted to do it and asked to do it on a weekly basis.

As a result we effectively run two assignments a week - one in the forum and one on the blog. Most people do one or the other, a few do both.

We have had a few issues with the image uploading tool to get pictures to show in comments, it's not perfect but they continue to be popular.

The popularity of the challenges varies from week to week depending on the topic. This week's has been small but the week before was the biggest for over a month. Looking back over the last 10 or so they yo-yo up and down a lot.

In terms of having a thread each week for the challenges - I'd be happy for someone to start a thread in the general area pointing to it if you'd like, however I think I'd prefer to keep most of the sharing going on on the blog - otherwise we kind of defeat the purpose of the challenges (ie providing a place to experiment and do challenges for blog readers). There are plenty of places here in the forums to share photos (assignments, share your shots, critique, how I took it, before and after) - not really sure we need another?

Happy to hear other opinions but that's where I stand on it at the moment unless there's a groundswell :-)

[freezeframe03]

Thanks Darren for your detailed explanation. I did not realize the weekend challenge was a blog thing (I'm one of the non-bloggers). I'll just look upon it as ideas for my own personal weekend photo challenge. It's just so much more enjoyable when I can share with and see what other people come up with.

Maybe I will consider trying to add the challenge for something like this in the Games and Challenges section. I'll have to think on how I could make that work out.

[Rolling Stone]

Am I wrong? Haven't I seen the blog challenges on the DPS' flickr page? Or is that something different altogether?