This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums

A quick note before we get into this week’s wrapup of the forums. There were some problems with the forum earlier in the week. Most of the problems should be fixed (although there are a handful of posts that may seem very out of order because of date problems), but if you’re still having problems accessing the forums Contact Us.

Weekly Assignment

This week, things got a little commercial in our assignments with our Product Photogrpahy assignment. The goal was to take a shot worthy of an advertisement photo. They may have the big budgets, but you all still have the creativity, and we had some really fantastic entries this time! Our winner was 3afsa for the shot of the Nike glasses that looked straight out of a magazine. Excellent lighting and product positioning really made this one stand out. Our first runner up was zetson for the Coke shot. Again, the lighting really made this one stand out, and of course, also made you want to reach out for an ice cold Coke! And last, but not least, pinkster88’s diamond shot went to show that when you need the perfect sparkle, only diamonds will do.

This 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 opposite of HDR approaches, which try to compress the range of contrast. In order to be eligible for the mini-contest, your photo must have been taken between 27 August – 10 September, your post must include “Assignment: Contre-jour” and the date the photo was taken, and the exif must be in tact. For all the contest rules, see the first post in the assignment. Next week’s assignment is “Morning”. So anything that has to do with the early part of the day.

Hot Threads

• RAW Photos Only: This week, private took the jump and started shooting in RAW. Now she’s posted a challenge for everyone out there, come join in this thread and shoot in RAW and post a result of it!
• Results always disappointing: You have the camera, you have the lenses, you have the perfect opportunity, you take all these shots you think will turn out great and what happens? You come back with shots that don’t even come close to what you thought you were capturing. How do you avoid that and get the shots that you really wanted to take?
• Share your Flickr Explored shots: Flickr has a little feature (algorithm) that picks out 500 shots per day and displays them on what it calls “Explore”. It’s not always the best pictures, but it’s fun to see if one of your photos has been featured in this display of photos. Come share which of your photos has been displayed in Explore in this thread.
• What Would You Do (#67): 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.