Entries are now being accepted for this month's competition -- make a post in this thread and attach your entry.

The theme for this month's competition has been chosen by the 1st Place WINNER of our November 2007 competition -- JANET PETTY.

Janet Petty chose the theme "Blue". This can refer to color, mood, or any concept that occurs to you.

Each member may submit only one entry for this competition.

Deadline for submitting your image: Sunday January 27th, 2008 at 12 pm EDT.

The goal of these friendly competitions is to inspire members to grab our camera and actually use it. New photos are our goal, but we also accept recently photographed/recently processed images that fit the topic also.

We'd love to hear any shooting info you have (shutter speed, ISO, f-stop) as well as any regular photographic post-processing -- cropping, levels, saturation, dodge/burn, etc. This isn't the place for Photoshop art filters -- we have other forums for that.

Feel free to add info about what/where you shot, and why you chose your subject/composition, etc. when you post your image in this thread.

What does the winner get? The winner gets to choose the next assignment (this time PLUS gets all the nice accolades that come from being chosen "Winner".

Post your photo submissions in this thread, and we'll have the separate thread for discussion of this assignment and your comments regarding any of the entries that strike your fancy.

All RetouchPro members may take part in the competition and all members may vote, whether they have submitted an entry or not.

This is my first ever post in RetouchPRO so I am just guessing on how to put my photo in here. I tried to ready the instructions but if I did something wrong please help me. Thank! I look forward to getting to know some of you.

Roxanneed

Here is my try for this contest! (http://www.retouchpro.com/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/5190/ppuser/47271)

Hi all and Happy New Year.

My first entry for 2008.

This is Lake Plimsoll, with my favourite hill in the middle. I love the different shades of blue in the sky and water.
I just did a levels adjustment and noise reduction.

Taken with a Panasonic FZ-20
F8
1/320 sec
ISO 100

I originally thought I'd go for a sad little two-year old; but this picture happened while I was driving my mother to the doctor. It's definitely blue. :)

Janet

While looking for a blue shot I tried an automatic exposure bracketing series, -0.7, -0.3, 0, +.03, +0.7. This one is the +.03 and appeared to be the bluest. My Camera is a Toshiba PDR-M500, I resized to 800x600 for the forum post.

It is my first image for the competition , Blue!

http://www.retouchpro.com/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/5140

Kombizz, you don't post a PM (personal message) link or email, so when you read this or the discussion thread, please give us info on how you created your image -- if it's photographic, please give us an idea of how you gave it more of a "graphic" look. :)

I took this of one of my grandaughters sat on my tumble drier in the back porch, due to the subject matter no flash was used ( hence the location for a bit of natural light on a grey day ) I then took it into photoshop just to crop
oh and i used the automatic setting on the camera ( i know very technical )

Palms

54313

The colors were changed in Photoshop and the focus of the flowers in the foreground was also sharpened.

Hope this finds everyone well. Sorry about not being around, just running busy and crazy. Hope you like this one. Let me know about how the res. looks please, when optimizing there was a huge gap between 50-51 on the scale. 50 gave me 88k and 51 gave me 103. I'll rework if needed.

Chris

Blue. Shot on Portra 160 NC with a Nikon F100. Drum scanned. One light off camera, bare bulb. F8 maybe? Only post was to try to make the tiny 100k file look 'ok' in the blue. (Still far from awesome in that respect and many others..)

Straightforward studio shot. Background was cleaned up to remove marks, and various dodging/burning stages were used.

This is a first for me: entering a photography competition :blush:
Resized and converted to JPG only.

Model: NIKON D70s
Exposure time: 1/400 s
F-number: f/8
Focal length: 18 mm
White balance: Auto
ISO setting: ISO 200
Lens: 18-70 mm

With the recent questioning of what should be allowed in our contest, I looked around the internet at other contests to see if there were rules we could consider copying. I noted that there were similar questions in other forums, but I didn't find any rule explanations that I could steal borrow to use here. Today I visited DGrin.com and found this post and thought it appropriate to post here (which means that I agree with it.)

Posted Question at DGrin.com regarding their photography contest:

"I haven't seen any mention of acceptable photoshopping?
none - direct from camera only? (rather - I guess resizing only?)
cropping?
only photo-wide corrections? like more contrast without using layer masks?
specific corrections? like adjusting curves for only part of the photo?
collaging multiple photos into the final submission?


Answer:

It's not in the rules because there really shouldn't be an artificial limit placed on what the photographer wants to do. If a photographer goes over the edge into mostly illustration or something, then they better make it really good to make it in a photography contest.
You are the artist. You decide what to do! "

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=501268&postcount=16

I was intrigued when I saw the theme for this months contest. Intrigued enough to make my first submission.

I wanted to make it blue so I set my white balance to "tungsten" and went outside.

Here is the rest of the info:

Camera: Canon Rebel XT
Lens: Canon EF-S 10-22mm

Exposure: 1/2000 at f/4.5
Exposure Bias Value: +0.33
Exposure mode: AV
ISO: 100
Focal Length 22mm

Used photoshop to convert from RAW to JPEG.
Slight Curves adjustment

No further entries will be allowed - this month's competition is now closed.

I'll open the Voting thread as soon as I can.