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Aug 9, 2012 5:00 PM   The Olympics are going on. And boy am I getting jealous of all those gold medals. So for this week's Shooting Challenge, you're going to go for the gold. (Well, photograph something, then blingify it.) Shoot a photo that contains at least one super gold element/object. You CAN use Photoshop this week (and you probably should)—to an extent. But make the end result photo look realistic. In other words, it shouldn't be a pure graphic like our lead photo. Make it a real scene that happens to have at least one crazy-gold element. So here's the deal. I want you to take a perfectly normal photo. Then take just one element, isolate it and make it gold. So maybe one car on a lot is GOLD or a mom is holding a baby that's GOLD. Think precious moments, made GOLD. I love this tutorial by Go Media (the clip is embedded here). Within the first minute, you'll figure out how to goldenfy any object. The next 15 or so minutes of the tutorial are really jus...

Aug 8, 2012 4:00 PM   WINNER: Uh Oh Canon EOS 1000D, 50mm, f1.8, 1/10, ISO 400. Set the camera on a tripod with a locking shutter release, locked it just did a little shadowboxing at the camera. Took about 200 shots to get the focus and blur just right. Post-process using Nik filters to get that Street Fighter IV-ish look. I figured this week's challenge fit perfectly for another hobby of mine; boxing. Blinking is a dangerous thing to do when you're in punching range of your opponent. You just might miss that jutting of the shoulder preceding a right cross and open your eyes to a very blurry close-up view of faux leather hitting you in the nose. - Bart Tieman View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Aug 1, 2012 2:00 PM   A blink goes by in just 1/10 of a second. What could have happened in this sub-moment that you missed? For this week's Shooting Challenge, show us what occurred in the 100 milliseconds that our eyes were closed. Take a photo that lasts 1/10th of a second. Big bonus points for playing off the "what happened when I blinked?" topic, so long as it's not just a person blinking. Set your camera's shutter to 1/10. Lock it down in Shutter Priority mode (you can find this setting as the "S" or "TV" on most dSLRS) or use full manual mode to make this happen 1/10th of a second is an interesting exposure. It's not fast enough to freeze motion, but it will smooth moving entities like flames. I really like this post on shooting 1/10th of a second, just for getting your feet wet with what's possible and probably. Then, check out this primer on shutter speeds for more general technical info. Also, check out two of our other shut...

Jul 24, 2012 2:00 PM   What does a dream look like? As vivid as the images may be in your sleep, by the time you wake they are long gone. But for this week's Shooting Challenge, you reassembled those fleeting pictures. I love taking photographs at night, but without the proper preparations (e.g., fast glass, tripod, sobriety), the resulting snaps are often too blurry to use. When it comes to photographic representations of dreams, however, some blurriness can actually be useful. My submitted photo started with just such a blurry pic - a late-night snapshot of a shadowy metal grate that was so out-of-focus that it was actually more ghostly and evocative than a tack-sharp photo would've been. That became the backdrop for a composite image of photos I took the following night, including a doll that hung over the DJ booth at a dance club, a seemingly dead-end apartment corridor, and the backside of an African mask that I spied through a shop window. The final addition was the tex...