This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums

Weekly Assignment

First up, are the winners of last week’s assignment, Purple. Some things were naturally purple, other things were coloured purple, but all things considered, there was a lot of purple going on in that thread!

Our winner was Ishkybob for the purple lime eyes. Not only was the shot fun, but it also was pretty darn effective and technically good too. Our runners up were umeshunni for the duck in the purple water (I hope that’s not it’s natural colour!) and Major_Small for the purple crayon (which was actually done using a ghetto lighting setup). Now, something that’s actually really cool about this week is that 2 of our 3 winners were brand new members to the forum and these were their first posts. So, let’s hope that we keep seeing more and more good entries from our new members!

Forget the fancy strobes and other lighting equipment, this week’s assignment is Ghetto Lighting. What this means is that you need to use the lighting that you have on hand to take the picture. Things like desk lamps or even fridge lights are perfect. In order to be eligible for the mini-contest, you need to have taken the picture between 2 and 15 January 2008, you must include “Assignment:Ghetto Lighting” somewhere in your post, and the exif must be in tact. Next week’s assignment will be good use of depth of field.

Weekly Poll

Well, next week’s assignment is Good use of depth of field”, but this week we asked you just how much depth of field you prefer in your photos? It was nearly a blow out with the results with 95% of people saying that they prefer a big aperture with the smooth out of focus background (or even foreground).

jdepould said “I live at f/2.8 90% of the time. I shoot a lot of sports and low-light stuff, so speed is priority one, and isolation a close second. I’ll shoot f/2.8 in broad daylight, give me those tack sharp 1/5000s images.” Which I’d say is a pretty good indication he voted for keeping that aperture wide open.

laepelba, on the other hand, said that she prefers a small aperture because “I greatly prefer landscape photography, and love the kinds of camera settings that absolutely require a tripod (because the shutter speed ends up being so slow) and I push the aperture # up as absolutely high as I can get it so that I can eek out as much detail as humanly possible. Besides … if you do a little bit of night photography, set your camera on a tripod and use f22 or so and a 30 second shutter speed, you’re likely to get beautiful little stars from all of the lights in your image.” Not a bad reason at all.

Watch for this week’s poll later in the day in the General Chat section of the forum.

Hot Threads

Business Card Experiment: Ahhh, DIY gear. We all love it. filemanager tested out using a business card to bounce the camera’s flash. Of course, it’s not quite that easy, but this thread offers a little advice about how to overcome some of the difficulties that may show up when using this trick.

Sweeney Todd: Movies with great cinematics always tend to inspire photographers to try to capture those same looks in still pictures. This thread tries to see if there’s a way to emulate the look seen in the movie Sweeney Todd, so if you have any ideas of how to do it, drop by the thread and see if you can offer some help.

Catchlights: What are they? Why are they important in photography: Clockdoc always comes out with these little gems of information about photography. This week, he explained to us not only what catchlights are, but also why they are important. Hint: It’s that little bit of light in the eyes.

Overcoming the imagined social stigma: Ok, we might all like to pretend like we don’t care if people look at us funny when we’re standing on our heads to get that perfect shot, or staring into the drain with our cameras. But what do you do to get over the feeling if you do feel like everyone is staring at you? Share your stories and your tricks for learning to just do what you enjoy doing: taking pictures.

Photographer Parents: The kids are running around, you’re spending time with them, but how do you also get the time to practice your photography and do your post-processing when you’re also spending time with your family? This thread offers a few suggestions for photographer parents who may be looking for a little help in finding a few extra minutes in the day for practising their photography.

Other Threads to Note

Another week means another chance to try out our weekly post processing challenge, What Would You Do. In these threads you take the picture given in the first post and edit it however you would like, then come back and post the result along with what you did. It’s a lot of fun, so drop by the thread and show us what you would do. The Classic Rock Challenge is back this week, and it’s already the 10th instalment of this game! This week’s album for you to interpret is Gino Vannelli’s self-titled album. The goal of these threads is to interpret either the album name or a song name in a picture. Good luck!