Picture: Rain storm clouds at sunrise over the still waters of Emerald Bay State Park, a National Natural Landmark in the South Lake Tahoe region, California Ack!! I can’t believe it’s been nearly four weeks since my last post, but I’ve been very busy with a couple assignments and trying to get my book out [...]

Picture: Annual lighting of the original fresnel lens at Pigeon Point Lighthouse, San Mateo County coast, California This week I’m delighted to announce I’m the special guest judge for friend and fellow photographer Guy Tal, who’s been running a series of weekly photo contests on his web site. I was allowed to choose the theme, [...]

Subtitle: How to do a Photo Contest wrong. Picture: Fall colors on grape vine leaves in autumn, vineyard in Alexander Valley, near Asti, Sonoma County Wine Growing Region, California Twice in this last week I saw a request related to a Photo Contest for the Verde Valley Wine Trail in Arizona. The reason it caught [...]

Picture: Sandstone Reflection at The Wave, Coyote Buttes, Paria – Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness, Arizona The current issue of Photo District News (Aug. ’09) has been sitting on my office desk for the last week, unopened and unread. That is until today, when I got an email from a different magazine editor congratulating me on having [...]

Another *Really* Horrible Rights Grabbing Contest – Costco Beware of the 2009 Costco Photo Contest; it’s especially bad considering how they treat you and your entry. Do they assert that they can do what they want with the winning images? No. Do they assert they can do whatever they want with any of your entries? [...]

Photographers Beware; There’s another really bad photo contest out there being run by what most would consider a very reputable institution. Courtesy of Photo Competitions, I saw their recent posting advertising an upcoming photo contest being done by the Smithsonian Magazine. The catch: Just by entering the contest, (as opposed to winning) you’ll be giving [...]

Pictures: Asilomar State Beach, Pacific Grove, Monterey Peninsula, California. The first is a straight RAW file; the second represents my standard image processing, which took less than 30 seconds, and the third is a “hyper-processed”, highly-saturated image like might often be seen on Flickr. Processing note; the only other manipulation to these images was a [...]

Photographer’s Forum Magazine is currently having it’s Spring Photo Contest, and it’s only open to Amateur Photographers. I mention this because I’d actually was a finalist winner in one of their Spring photo contests years ago. Current deadline is April 20, 2009 for the early bird entries, and May 11, 2009 for the final entry [...]

Picture: Photographer taking a picture of the Colorado River canyon at Toroweap, Grand Canyona National Park, Arizona I really can’t begin to tell you all how good it is to be slowly getting myself back into the real world, and for a chance to start getting some work done; like catching up on an entire [...]

Subtitle: “We care not about your stupid photo idea, just deliver us eyeballs and page views for our branding and ad revenue.” A few weeks ago I first heard about an upcoming photo contest, Name Your Dream Assignment, where you could win $50,000.00 to photograph your winning idea. Sounds great, right? I thought so. Then [...]