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I am honest with you a week is to short for me. I have commitments during the day and do work different shifts every week. So if the challenge is a week i will not be able to participate. I am happy with a month or even two months. I do not see a problem with the winner choosing the next theme but PK do also have valid points that it is a challenge to improve ones photography and not a competition.God Bless.

I must admit that I don't entirely understand this view - maybe someone else can chime in?

I mean, I understand being busy! - but the way I see the challenges is as a source of inspiration if you have time to shoot but no ideas.

So if you've no time to shoot, no big deal - you probably don't have time to look at the challenge either. If you do have time to shoot, but no inspiration, you check out the challenge to see if it stirs some creativity.

Perhaps others see the challenge differently?

@**MrsLubner: **Fair enough.

A thought you might be able to pass up the chain to make your job easier - this forum supports tables, links and images, so there's no particularly good reason a coder in administration couldn't provide you with a tool that would automatically generate a forum-post version from a list of image ID's, doing away with the seperate HTML version entirely.

For example, here's a quick mockup I did using just the tools available in the forum - it took a while, and I certainly can't recommend doing it by hand! But with access to the database writing a tool to autogenerate this table would be trivial.

EDIT: Example deleted because this forum software strips out the tables it allowed you to create when it saves the post!

Sure, that's how it is, and how it has been for a long time.

Can't see anyone forcing you to keep it that way. If you have a winner, you give people a reason to participate, and by displaying the winner, you improve the visiblity of the challenge.

Anyhow, it was just a thought.

Another: if the challenge is to be kept non-competitive, why does it run so long? If it's just a fun "shoot some images on this theme and show them here", why run it longer than a week? As it is, a person can check the challenge, think "nah, not interested this month", and then it's a whole month before there's something new to consider.

I'd rather see the opposite encouraged - one image per member, but the post may be edited at any time during the month to submit a better entry.

I'd also like to see a requirement that submissions are shot after the contest commences, not recycled from the archives.

Finally, I've never understood why the contests stand seperately from the gallery - I think it would encourage participation if members could simply link to gallery submissions instead of preparing a smaller version for the forums.

(As a side note: on one forum I participate in, there is a simple non-material prize for winning the monthly contest - the winner chooses the theme for the following month)

Thanks for the inclusion - although for some reason the thumbnail of my image appears distorted in the preview, despite being correct on the actual collage.

I have submitted an application - my apologies for its length and pomposity!

Ooh, I'm on a roll this year, LWITG's 6, 16, 19 and 40 ;o) Not bad from 10 images in 6 distinct weeks.

Congratulations everyone, and thanks to be people who put this together, it's always a pleasure to quickly catch up on the galleries.

Always an honour to be included - I must be on a roll this year! I've uploaded images in 5 weeks, and been featured in 3 of them ;o)

And it's lovely to be featured right alongside Goldenjera, my lovely girlfriend, model and pupil ;o)

Thanks to you all!

Aperture gets slow fast. Horrid bokeh and CA, and merely acceptable sharpness - might as well be shooting with a superzoom compact and not bother with the DSLR.

(To it's credit, though this new version does focus MUCH better than its predecessor, and the image stabilisation is quite effective. So that's something)

You're not wrong, but a compact does have one large disadvantage for composition: Depth of Field. Too much of it, to be specific. There're lots of shots in the photography gallery here which are sound in concept, but which suffer from a cluttered composition thanks to all the stuff still clearly visible in the background.

Doesn't mean compacts can't take a good photo, though...I might make a point of shooting with the S95 a bit next week to see what I come up with.

Interesting - I chose to do it that way intentionally, but it seems I'm the only one who liked the 30's film-star style I was aiming for. Incidentally, a better raw conversion reveals loads of highlight detail, I only posted that one to show how it would've looked straight from the camera. I do think you're right, though - she's asked for some prints to gift to her boyfriend and geographically remote family members, and those will be in colour.

No, no, not offended at all, just airing my thought processes - tone is always hard to read in a forum, so it's my turn to apologise for worrying you ;o)

(That said, I'm amused no end by the "I like the postwork on both" style comments, since the whole point is that the colour image has no "creative" postwork at all, just a crop, resize, border and sharpen. The rest was just incredibly nice light)

Funnily enough, this photo was taken about 30 metres from a SpecSavers....

As to the blown highlights...well, yes, they're blown, quite intentionally, but I was aiming for "radiant glow" rather than "radioactive mutant". Perhaps I overshot a touch!

Now I'm terribly confused, maybe you posted just after I added the attachment. The postworked version is mostly sepia. The original is full colour.

Anyhow, I can take a compliment, and so I shall ;o) Thanks mate.