This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums

Weekly Assignment

And The Eyes Have It in this week’s assignment. You got up close and personal and showed us what eyes can do for a picture. And there were a lot of really great entries to choose from this week! As a matter of fact, we wound up with a 4 way tie among the runners up! Our winner was Drax for the picture of the monster’s eye. We all figured we wouldn’t want this guy staring us down! Now, as for our 4 runners up, let’s start with private for her picture of the masked man. Next was liliann for her fun wide-eyed picture taken with a wide angle lens. Next up is ni2sml for his close-up shot of an eye, with some fantastic colours! And last, but not least, contrary to her name, k9mom posted a picture of her youngest cat’s eyes!

This week’s assignment is Product Photography. You’ve just been hired by *insert name of local huge department store here* to shoot an object that you would find on their shelves – how will you shoot it? how will you light it? In order to be eligible for the mini-contest, your photo needs to have been taken between 20 August and 3 September 2008, the EXIF needs to be intact (and it helps if you include some of the main points in your post), and you must include the words “Assignment:Product Photography” to show that you want your picture to count for the contest.

Next week’s assignment is Contre-jour. Contre-jour is a french term meaning “against the light”. Take a photo that exploits lighting and plays with under and over-exposed areas to dramatic effect – in other words, the complete opposite of HDR approaches which try to compress the range of contrast.

Hot Threads

• How to talk show without inviting critiques: There’s always the risk that when you’re friends with photographers, the inevitable discussion of your work will come up, which is likely to bring various critiques. So, what do you do when you just want to talk shop with your photography friends and don’t want to sit there and listen to a detailed critique of everything they think you do wrong? Come share your advice in this thread.
• Funeral photography…?: When one forum member’s friend died recently, he was asked to take photos at the funeral. What he said was “During the service i felt almost disrespectful, and perhaps even rude. I felt like to people, it would appear like i was in some way trying to make money out of the death of my friend. While really i was trying to capture the moment, as a fitting tribute to the passing of a great mate.” How do you handle a situation like this though? If you have any advice this thread in the forums would be a great place for it.
• Anything bad ever happen to your camera?: Could there be anything worse than something happening to your camera? Consider this thread a bit of “therapy” to get a chance to talk about what you’ve managed to do to your camera, and hopefully you can tell us that it was all OK, or that it at least gave you a reason to buy the fancy new camera / lens you’d been hoping to get.
• Why all the hate on the d40?: Few other cameras get as much discussion as the Nikon d40. But what about all the good things that it can do. Come share your opinions and examples in this thread about the d40, and come show us why there’s no reason to hate it.
• What Would You Do (#67): We’ve really come a long way since these threads started, and this week is no exception. This is our ongoing post-processing thread, open to all levels of skill, where you get to try your hand at post-processing another member’s photo. The full rules are in the thread.