Not one. Not two. Not three. Or even four. Five. FIVE. FIVE!! That’s the number of Photograph of the Month contests Oneof42 has now won - and he’s only been a member of the Corner for less than 3.5 years. There were fourteen photographs that made it to the voting round for the July 2009 Photograph of the Month, but once the all the votes were tallied, Andy’s “Hard Day” won out with over 21% of the votes. You can check out all the photographs that were up for the July 2009 Photograph of the Month in the Corner Contest Gallery, and you can see the final voting results in the July 2009 PotM voting thread.

The contest was sponsored by a very cool company in MOO.com, and for winning the July 2009 Photograph of the Month, Andy picks himself up a MOO ‘Pro’ Pocket Portfolio Pack (prize valued at $210, which includes: 1 × 200 pack of Business Cards, 1 × 100 pack of MiniCards, 1 × 60 pack of Postcards, 1 × 25 pack of Greeting Cards and 1 x Leather Business Card Holder).

Make sure you drop by the July 2009 PotM award thread to congratulate Andy on his fifth Photograph of the Month victory. Read more »

Just as the voting for the July 2009 Photograph of the Month contest comes to a close, so starts the voting for the Contest Corner Challenge #64: Like a Child. CCC#64: Like a Child challenged photographers to simply take a photograph of a child, and 25 photographers accepted that challenge. You can view their photographs in the Photo Gallery, then decide which one is both the best technically and best depicts the theme of the contest by casting your vote in the voting thread. Read more »

Since the recent restructuring of the Corner Forums, we also updated some of the guidelines, including the guidelines for the new Photo Sharing Corner, and the guidelines for the updated Critiques & Feedback Corner. After some discussion, we’ve decided to make a minor update to the guidelines. Now, the guidelines for the Photo Sharing Corner and the Critiques & Feedback Corner contain the following note: “It’s often easier to show people rather than tell them how you’d change their photographs. Some people, however, don’t appreciate it when you edit their photographs. If you want to edit someone’s photograph, please make sure to ask before going ahead and making those changes.” Pretty straight-forward and simple: if you want to help someone by editing someone’s photograph, just ask first. Other than that, everything is the same as it ever was. If you haven’t jumped in to the new Photo Sharing Corner and Critiques & Feedback Corner, you should check them out - lots of great photographs being shared in the Photo Sharing Corner, and some great feedback and critiques in the Critiques & Feedback Corner.  Read more »

The Corner Newsletters are supposed to come out sometime around the middle of each month. This past month, as you’ll read about in the newsletter, has been a crazy one around the Corner, with all the changes and forum restructuring. Luckily, the June 2009 newsletter got out before the end of June, and if it hasn’t arrived in your inbox already, you can read it online in the Corner Newsletter Archives. Don’t forget to check out the sponsor of the June 2009 Newsletter: Competico.com - a social network for both amateur and professional photographers. Check out all their contests here. We’ve also managed to get a special deal where you can submit a photograph for free – check out the hottest competitions/cutest pet contest here, and enter for free for a chance to win $333. Oh, and before the deal runs out, don’t forget to pick up your ColorRight white-balance tool for only $79 here.

Now go and spend 5 or 10 minutes reading the newsletter!  Read more »

Every month, during the last week of the month, the PhotographyCorner community gets a chance to browse through the best photographs posted to the Corner over the past month, and vote on which one they think is the best. June flew by, and it’s time to decide which photograph should be crowned the July 2009 Photograph of the Month. We have 14 photographs up for the honour (and prizes!) this month, including two by jaharris1001 and two by shutterbug2007.

You can browse through the nominated photographs in the July 2009 Photograph of the Month Gallery and then you have until the wee-morning hours of July 1st to cast your vote in the voting thread (you can also view the photos in the voting thread).

The contest is sponsored by MOO.com - a new type of online stationer where you can upload your own photography to print high quality Business Cards, MiniCards, Postcards and more (with a different photo on every card!). Make sure to check out all the products you can create at www.MOO.com.

If the winner is a Premiere Member, they will receive an a MOO ‘Pro’ Pocket Portfolio Pack (prize valued at $210, which includes: 1 × 200 pack of Business Cards, 1 × 100 pack of MiniCards, 1 × 60 pack of Postcards, 1 × 25 pack of Greeting Cards and 1 x Leather Business Card Holder). If the winner is not a Premiere Member, they will receive a MOO Pocket Portfolio Pack (prize valued at $97, which includes: 1 × 50 pack of Business Cards, 1 × 100 pack of MiniCards, 1 × 20 pack of Postcards, 1 × 10 pack of Greeting Cards and 1 x Acrylic Business Card Holder). Those prizes make me wish I had a photograph up for the July 2009 Photograph of the Month.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the photos in the gallery, and cast your vote before the end of the month! Read more »

If you haven’t been paying close attention to the Corner Forums or the Corner Resource Center, you may have missed the three new product reviews that have been uploaded to the Corner Resource Center in the past week. If you want to write a product review and have it added to the Corner Resource Center, check out this thread that outlines how to write it and put it all together. Read more »

The June 2009 edition of the Corner Newsletter is set to go out in a couple of days (hopefully before the weekend, as I’m planning to be camping all weekend) and, as always, that means it’s time to hand out Commitment Awards to those that have reached milestones with regards to their post-count in the past month. Commitment Awards are handed out to those who have shown great community dedication & commitment, and have reached a specific post-count milestone (1k, 2k, 5k and 10k). This month, 2 members are receiving awards, and the both happen to be moderators. So a DOUBLE thanks to chellezfotoz and Musteno802 for your dedication and commitment to making PhotographyCorner an awesome online destination for photographers! Read more »

Of all of the prizes from the 2008 Photograph of the Year contest, I’ve received the most positive feedback on the ColorRight prizes. If you’re the type of photographer that shoots in raw and fixes white balance in post production, picking up a ColorRight of your own may be a good idea. With light changing all the time, it’s hard to get the right color balance in camera, and with evolution of digital photography, we can tweak the temperature of our photographs more than even before.

But why spend all that time playing around in post processing when you can get it right “in-camera”? ColorRight is a lens filter-like tool that can help you do just that. Basically, you place it over the end of your dSLR and take a sample photo. This gives your camera an accurate reading of the temperature of the light. Once your camera knows what the lighting conditions are, you’ll have an accurate white balance for the rest of your photographs (or at least until the lighting changes, when all you have to do is switch to manual focus, change your camera settings to “custom white balance,” and take another sample photo).

 Read more »

If you have kids, you know that for 20 years or so, the majority of your photographs are, not surprisingly, of your kids. There’s something special about the pure joy and innocence that can be captured in the photograph of a child, and now you have the chance for that photograph to win you some cash. Contest Corner Challenge #64: Like a Child challenges you to simply take a photograph of a child or of children.

The contest is sponsored by Competico, the world’s leading online photo contest website, and are offering the following as prizes: If the winner is a Premiere Member, they will receive a $50 credit in their Competico account and 5 PhotographyCorner pens. If the winner is not a Premiere Member, they will receive a $25 credit in their Competico account and 2 PhotographyCorner pens. Entries must be taken between the contest announcement date (June 12th, 2009) and June 29th, 2009. Check out the contest announcement thread for all the details. Read more »

After a week of voting, Contest Corner Challenge #63: Intensity has come to a close. With 25 entries, the voting was pretty spread out, but Ball Intensity by PicturePony came out on top (by a mere 1 vote!) with one-sixth of the votes (almost 17%!).

For winning Contest Corner Challenge #63: Intensity, Sharon picks herself up an Urban Disguise 20 camera bag courtesy of our sponsor, Think Tank Photo (Use code WS-171 to receive a free bag with every order over $50 - and part of every order goes to support the Corner as well!!). You can browse through all 25 entries, as well as find who took each entry in the CCC#63: Intensity Photo Gallery. The voting results are now publicly available in the voting thread, and you can congratulate Sharon on her win by commenting in the award thread.

Congratulations on your first CCC win, Sharon! Read more »

With a bunch of restructuring going on in the Corner Forums, it can get confusing as to where to put your photographs. Here’s a little breakdown of what should go where. To start off, you have 3 options: the Corner Galleries, the Photo Sharing Corner, and the Critiques & Feedback Corner. Read more »

It’s been a long couple of days, but the first phase of the forum restructuring we’ve been doing is now complete. Last night we opened up the new Photo Sharing Corner, and tonight, we’ve opened up the new Critiques & Feedback Corner. Of course, it will take several more weeks for all the old threads to be moved to their new homes, but in the meantime, you can continue to post photos for fun and for critique! Read more »

One of the main changes in the Corner Forums that we’re making is the addition of the Photo Sharing Corner - a place where you can just share photographs without having to worry about feedback or critique, or having to provide EXIF data or anything like that. Want to show off a photo of your cat making “that face” or a couple photos you took at the BBQ last night? The Photo Sharing Corner is the place for those type of photos. Read more »

It’s been a long time coming, but we’re finally going to do some restructuring in the Corner Forums. But with almost 50,000 threads and more than 350,000 posts in the Feedback and Critiques Corner alone, it’s going to take some time (if you haven’t already, make sure to thank a mod today).

Right now, on top of the Critiques Corner, we have 18 Feedback Corner sub-forums. For a while, we thought it would be better to have more subject-specific forums. And, for a while, it worked well. Unfortunately with so many forums, it became confusing to old and new members alike. It has gotten to the point where the line between critique and feedback became so blurred that even the mods and myself had a hard time explaining the difference. Sub forums with so many subjects became confusing, and some went all but unused. Read more »

Since we changed up the Contest Corner Challenges for 2009, we’ve allowed an extra week or so for entries to come in for each contest. That change has resulted in more entries, but more importantly, higher-quality entries. Just take a look at the photographs entered for Contest Corner Challenge #63: Intensity. They are fantastic, which makes your job that much more difficult. Read more »

It’s June 1st, which means it’s time to announce the photograph that will be featured on the homepage of PhotographyCorner.com for June 2009. Over the past week the community has been voting on which photograph they think is the best from the past month. Photographs are nominated throughout the month by Premiere Members, then the whole community gets to vote. The results are in, and the winner of the June 2009 Photograph of the Month contest is “Moonrise Over the Wreck” by Garry! Read more »

Just a quick post to let you know that a new product review on Memolio.com has been posted in the Corner Resource Center. Memolio.com is a web start-up that creates double-sided, tear-resistant, waterproof, 12-page mini photo albums. I had the chance to create and order one for free. Check out the review here. Read more »

I know there are a bunch of stock photography sites out there; and there have been numerous debates on stock photo sites versus microstock sites, and whether or not it’s a viable way for photographers to make some money from their photographs. Some photographers simply refuse to sell their photographs via microstock sites, and some even refuse to do stock photography at all. That may be because there are not a lot of good opportunities for amateur photographers to make any decent money with stock photography. A new kid on the block, StockPhotoDirect.com, aims to change that. Read more »

The Month of May has come and gone, and June is soon approaching. So quickly, in fact, that it’s already time to vote for the June 2009 Photograph of the Month. We have a great line-up of 12 photographs to vote on this month, including two winners from our Premiere Projects. Check out the entries in the June 2009 Photograph of the Month Gallery, then head back over to the Corner Forums and cast your vote. Read more »

So, you have purchased a good digital camera or even a dSLR, and you are wondering how to deal with your memory cards, what sorts of images should be kept or deleted, and what kind of compression you should use when saving images to a memory card. The answer to the first question – how to deal with your memory cards – is: buy as many as you can afford. The reason for that is actually the answer to the second question – what images should be kept and which deleted? All images should be kept. Read more »