This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums

It’s been a big week this week since we added a new area to the forums. Read all about it further down in this post.

Weekly Assignment

This week we finished the Weathered Assignment. The entries were great, and I’m sure that people will keep contributing to this topic long after this week. Our winner for this week’s mini-competition was clear though. tad2106’s picture really stood out this week because of the bright colours that were still able to show signs of weathering. Our runners up were Susan, for her out of the box idea of weathering a person for winter through the “Winter Initiation Ceremony”, and vandervalk for his picture of the weathered posts in the water.

Our latest assignment is Light Play. The idea is that photos should play and experiment with available light or man-made light. After-all, photographs are all about light. In order to be considered for the mini-contest, photographs must have been taken between 12-25 September 2007, the exif must still be in tact, and you need to tag your post with “Assignment: Light Play”. You can still post other photographs that don’t meet these criteria, but they won’t be considered for the contest. Next week’s assignment will be “In my life” which gives you a chance to show off something that tells us about your personality or that special person in your life that means a lot to you.

Weekly Poll

This week, we asked people if they preferred candid portraits or posed portraits. Candids kicked posed’s butt! 94% of people chose candid portraits over posed ones. Now that is an overwhelming result!

Teewinot said “Candid all the way. Often only with candid can you capture a REAL moment, emotion, event, or person. Priceless.”

And… well, it was hard to find someone that had something positive to say about posed shots, but peeperita preferred posed shots because “being able to take my time and think about light placement and fstops truly improves my portrait work…..not to mention the right poses can make or break how my subject feels about the shot….”

This week, come answer the question: Indoors or Outdoors?

Hot Threads

HDR: High Dynamic Range photographs are all the rage. These are photos where you take several pictures and merge them together to get a more consistent level of exposure throughout the picture. This thread has some examples of HDR as well as some tips to get you started.

Photographers, photographers.. and more photographers: A little bit of humour for your weekend about the lengths that photographers go to, to get the perfect shot.

Vulture: Ahhh, everyone’s favourite bird, the vulture. Well, maybe not everyone’s favourite, but this one sure manages to look cute. A shot from the Critique My Shot forum.

How to recover and fix a corrupt memory card: An older thread, but one that has resurfaced. We all like to take precautions to make sure that our hard-drives are protected, but what happens when your pictures don’t even make it that far because of a corrupted memory card? This thread has a few suggestions for what you can do before you give up all hope that your pictures are gone.

Other Threads to Note

After some requests from forum members for a place to sell their used camera gear, we’ve decided to add a Gear for Sale forum. If you’re looking for a place to buy and sell gear, then check out the new forum area, but don’t forget to read the rules.

We’re also another week closer to the end of the alphabet threads, but don’t forget that you can keep contributing to any of the past threads. So we’re up to V is for… this week. Views, vistas, cars going vroom, vroom, we’ve got it all. Drop by this thread with your pictures of things that start with V. We’re also on to week 18 of What Would You Do, our weekly post-processing thread. This week we’ve worked on an underwater picture, and there have been some really creative solutions. So if you want to work on (or show off) your post-processing skills, drop by here.