January Assignment

Hey y'all!

Just in case anyone is up for it, how about this for the end of January

2 Assignments

• Winter Wonderland
  
• Portrait (Full Color)
  

more more drool...

Here is the HD video from the canon 5d markII

the clarity of the nights shots is amazing

http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=GetArticleAct&articleID=2086

Drool....Canon 5D Mark II

Full motion HD video

http://gizmodo.com/5052767/a-taste-of-the-canon-5d-mark-iis-mindblowing-full-hd-video

New d90 does HD video

uh...... maybe i shouldve waited a year?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/technology/personaltech/28pogue.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&em

hopefully a preview of a feature that will be standard on all DSLRs in the years to come

New photos

Here are some new photos...not related to any monthly tasks:

Some useful links

Hey here are some useful links i found recently with good info. BTW if you have anything for June post it! i got a couple and will put em up soon.

5 Ways to Hold Your Viewer’s Attention
5 simple composition techniques

Nine Reasons to Manually Focus When Taking Pictures
Sometimes manual focusing is your best option

The Importance of focus and quick tips on how to get it right
Another focusing related tutorial

Understanding Camera Exposure Modes
Talking you through spot, evaluative and center-weighted metering.

Strategies for Avoiding Flash Blow Out
We’ve all suffered from it - but how do you overcome flash blowout?

Rules of Composition for Landscape Photography
Some basic ideas on composition

Using Flash in Action Photography
Tips and some cool photos

June Assignment

Here are the assignments we talked about in the comments.

3 Assignments (pick at least 2)

• Night Shot
  
• Water
• 10 second exposure
  

Due date is the end of June so theres plenty of time :D

April Assignment (Farshid)

I forgot about depth of field (and besides, it does not get much better than Dhab's, minus the pole picture). Here is my framing one...

April Assignment (Poya)

Ok here are my attempts...

Framing:


I admit it's kind of cheezy. The runner up was the following, where two guys' heads were acting as a frame:



Depth of Field:

For some reason the simiplicity of this shot appealed to me.

Runner up:


Action Shot:
Hard one. This one is not really an action shot (walking doesn't count...), and it's only accidental that the delegate is in focus.



The only adjustments were cropping and a straightening.

April Assignments (Dhabih)

Depth of Field

I didn't have time to do an action shot. I'm guessing no one else had time to do either ;)

April Assignment.

I'll just finalize this since April is mostly done.

3 Assignments (pick at least 2)

• Depth of Field
  
• Framing
• Action Shot
  

Since there isn't much time left lets try to get at least 1 or 2 of these 3. I'm not super sure what you meant by framing Poya so if you could clarify in the comments.

April Assignment?

I'm assuming there are a few more people on this blog who haven't submitted for March yet. But we should get going on April assignments. Let's quickly come up with a couple of topics and go with it. My suggestions:

- Framing
- Large DOF

March Assignments (Farshid)

Here are my clicks. Starting with my favorite (shocking I know!) is the b&w portrait of Carmel. I love this picture and I took it in color and turned it b&w in PS.




Next we have "green". Don't feel like I did much of an original work here, but it does the job. I should have been more creative, but it's easy to get laxy and just shoot something green when the deadline approaches. :)




And finally we have the oxymoron. This one was hard, but considering I relate to this situation frequently, it was the natural choice to shoot this.



As for adjustment, nothing except cropping and turning the portrait from color to b&w. Oh, yea, don't have a night shot to contribute this time around.

March Assignments (Dhabih)

So unfortunately, i didn't end up getting a photo for the Oxymoron challenge. The couple ideas I had, one i didnt have time to do, and the other i missed my chance. I was gonna take a picture of the snow with the cherry blossoms out front our house but it melted by morning. Looks like Sean already beat me too it anyway ;) So anyway here's the rest of mine:

Sajen being weighed

I'm including another shot i liked but decided not to submit as my main one :

I didn't have any night shots i really liked but since i wanted to post something here is the only one that looked interesting:

Night
Finall here is the Green one, from a flowershop in my building:

As far as touch-ups:

for the B&W i chose the green channel from the full color photo as my b&w image, other than that no photoshop.

For the Night shot i cropped and rotated it a bit

For the Green I had to boost the brightness a bit because i accidently had my camera taking -1 brightness pics and didn't realize it. I also took a little bit of the yellow out.

March Assignments (Poya)

Alright so here are my entries:

B&W portrait: I've looked at this way too much and not sure if it works. It definitely looks better in color. I also tried to crop out the distracting person in the background but it made the picture too...cramped. Any suggestions (besides photoshop action) is welcome.


Green: I did take this photo in March, but it's cheating a little since I took it after I found out about this blog. It's taken in Bahji


Oxymoron: This was very though. Couldn't think of much, and I don't know if the following can really be considered an oxymoron. I just thought having a big rock in the middle of a path was bizzare and interesting.


And here is one that didn't make it to the final cut:

Springless in Seattle

This is Seattle.

It's Spring, or so the cherry tree thinks...
But wait!


an oxymoron production by Sean Youssefi

Time to Deliver

Alright, the time has come to post your March contributions and here are some suggestions for how to do it:

• Write a post on this blog, make smaller versions of your pictures and include them as part of your post commenting each picture if you wish.
• Put them on another site (e.g. flickr), write a post with your comments including the links to the pictures
• Any other way that works for you as long as all we need is to come to this blog to find the pictures.

Look forward to seeing the pics!

One week left!

Sup y'all, Just a reminder there is a week left for March assignments. It's looking like 4 assignments might be a bit much for some, so perhaps next month we'll do two instead. Also in the comments part of this post please submit ideas for next months assignments.

Clarification

I just wanted to clarify i was thinking there are 4 assignments for March, not just the Oxymoron one. I heard there might be confusion on that. Obviously if you don't want to you can only do the first one, but its more fun to have a variety of things and the first one is just the challenge which is supposed to be a bit harder than the rest.

Using your SB-600 as a slave.

Wow, i just found this out! I know a couple of you have this flash, and i love the fact that you can do this with the sb-600:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/ittlslave.htm

Scroll down to see how to do this. He explains it for the d70, on the d80 its item #22 and not #19 (if your CSM menu is in in fullmode)

It lets you put your SB-600 anywhere in the room and use it as a slave! I just tried this out and its awesome! This could come in handy especially for portrait shots.

March Assignment.

4 Assignments

• Oxymoron (Photograph two opposite concepts within one frame)
• Green
• B&W Portrait
• the Night

I think every month should have one focused challenge assignment such as the Oxymoron one above. This is one assignment that pushes us to try something new and is more focused than the other 3. What you all think?
We'd talked about the role of post-process in these and I think the concensus was that minimal photoshop can be used if desired (levels, saturation, cropping, straightening), but you must declare along with the image what exactly was done. I think the idea though is that the less photoshop the better and hopefully we'll all get good enough that we barely ever need it. We can discuss more in the comments for this post if wished. Maybe the original untouched photo should be available for others to view also?

Assignments are due end of day, March 31st.

Welcome.

Let's kick this photo challenge off. I've gone ahead and started us off with a few assignments. If any of these are overwhelmingly disliked we can pick something else, but i figured it'd at least get us started.
Using this blog as the format I think will be the cleanest way of doing this, you are all authors of the blog so you can all post your pictures here too. As such:


There's 2 ways to post photos, either by uploading from your hard disk or linking to an external site. If you have a flickr or picasa account and have photos hosted there, it's preferable to do that as this blog only has 500MB of space for uploading pictures. Any questions post in the comments.