Photo.net Newsletter: November 6, 2008

Hi %%First Name%%,

So what’s new where you live? Here in the USA we are recovering from being almost drowned by the 4 million political ads we have been forced to endure over the past month. I am so happy that November 4th is now over. We can get back to important things like photography. Red state photographer, blue state photographer—we’re all the same in the darkroom.

Upcoming Photo.net announcements will include some serious forum improvements, the 2008 Holiday Gift Guide, a new partnership with Adorama, plenty of articles in the “middle of the month” editorial newsletter, EXIF reading for gallery uploads, and all sorts of other wicked cool craziness. Next week will be the start of my 11th year on photo.net. Perhaps I’ll make you all listen to a rambling old-man type story about how photo.net used to be so much better back in the wild-west days.

Okay, so I’m probably not going to be writing my photo.net memoirs any time soon. But I am pleased to announce a new column: Coming Home to Filmtown (written by yours truly), looking at one interesting film camera and type of film each month. While digital photography rules the day for many photo.net photographers, the use of film still has a very loyal following with photo.net members. Film lovers, you are not forgotten. Silver halide is not a myth! If you are a film photographer, I hope you will read the articles and contribute your experiences with the article’s subject camera or film. If you are a digital photographer you might enjoy some “blast from the past” reminiscing. Who knows, you might even dig one of those old film cameras out of the closet.

To encourage our film photographers to contribute their own experiences with the camera and/or film in each Filmtown column edition, we’re going have a small contest for each article. Simply make a post in the comments section of the current month’s article Yes, if you make a post it has to add some information about or a photo taken with the film or camera in the article (one photo per person please, see the Community Guidelines regarding not posting multiple photos at a time). I will pick the post or photo I like the best and send the winner a prize. This month’s prizes will be a Holga for the best Holga post and five rolls of BW400CN for the best film post. See this month’s article for more details.

So until next time, stop worrying about the economy/election/environment/stock market and go take some photos. And keep an eye out for Hannah’s editorial newsletter in a few weeks.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions, please send them to me directly at contact@photo.net. Enjoy the newsletter!

Sincerely,

Josh Root

Photo.net Director of Community

Latest Articles

Perhaps now is the time to put those reading skills to work. Drift indoors for a lazy afternoon and learn some new ideas on how to make your photography work for you. We’ve included a few articles here and will be presenting a whole pile of new content in the next editorial newsletter later this month.

We’re happy to introduce a new author on the site, Lou Jones, a seasoned travel and commercial photographer. Lou has done work for IBM, Major League Baseball, Federal Express, Peugeot, Museum of Fine Arts, Paris Match, KLM, National Geographic, People Magazine, Nike, Price Waterhouse, and Aetna. His assignments have taken him to Europe, South America, Africa, the Far East & 47 of 50 States. Lou’s first article on photo.net discusses “Marketing Travel Photography.” He walks us through the many ways in which you can make money off of top-quality travel photos.

• Marketing Travel Photography

The entire digital workflow process, from start to finish, can be daunting. Smooth out the end results by color calibrating your monitor. I take a look at one of the powerful color calibration tools on the market: Spyder3. Read about my experience with the tool and what it can do for you.

• Datacolor Spyder3 Elite Review

Introducing the “Coming Home to Filmtown” monthly column. As I mentioned in the introduction to this newsletter, this is a new column where I take a look a specific camera and film stock each month. This month, I speculated on the plastic fantastic Holga medium format camera and Kodak’s chromogenic (color process) BW400CN film. Be sure to see my note in the introduction about how you can win your own Holga or some of Kodak’s BW400CN film.

• Coming Home to Filmtown: Population One Digital Nerd
• Coming Home to Filmtown (Nov ‘08 Column): Holga and Kodak BW400CN

Featured Member Photographer: Damir Sencar

Every photograph is a moment in time. Some moments are there for years (landscapes), some for minutes (portraits), and some for seconds (wedding kiss). The photography that Damir Sencar does is there for a fraction of a second.

Damir is a Croatian photographer who has won multiple awards for his sports/action photography. He has covered sports events all over Europe and the world. Starting out professionally as a photo editor at the Croatian News Agency, he quickly moved his way up to being one of his country’s preeminent sports photographers.

”I prefer sports to all the other fields, because when shooting sports action, I can always take a photo of something new, a moment the human eye cannot catch. As a photographer, that is the time when I am completely on my own—just predicting what the athlete will do. Pressing a shutter button at the right time can get you beautiful frozen moments—action/sports photography is like adrenalin to me.” -Damir Sencar

Read More »

Samples from the member’s portfolio:

View Damir’s entire portfolio »

What’s Happening In Our Forums

• Classic Manual Cameras (162 Responses) Siren Song of the Russians
• Canon EOS (58 Responses) Are crop cameras going to disappear?
• Digital Darkroom (77 Responses) Linear Processing of RAW Image Files .
• Leica and Rangefinders (73 Responses) ...but its still just a light proof box basically right??

Go to Photo.net Forums »

Project Of The Month: Hip to be Square

No fancy techniques. No required subjects. Just a cropping decision. Shoot square, crop square, I don’t care. No, I don’t care.

The photography world is dominated by rectangles. How about some love for our friend the square? (Yes, math geeks, I realize that a square is technically a rectangle.)

I think we as photographers naturally gravitate to the rectangular shape because that is how we see the world through our eyes. Through cropping or shooting in a square, we can present a subject in a completely different way than if it was in a rectangular shape. If you have never thought about your images as a square, it’s a wonderful thing to learn.

See all of the Monthly Projects (and submission instructions) on the Monthly Project Index page. Also, be sure to take a look at last month’s Bounce Flash project page and see all the wonderful images that were uploaded. Here are a few that caught my eye:

Editors’ Picks

Product Photography

Samples: