Epic Edits

One of the best ways to improve your photography is to challenge yourself and push the limits of your comfort zone — see what PhotoChallenge.org has in store for 2010!

Ah yes… another year is coming to an end and it’s time to reflect on what we accomplished in the last 12 months. With photography, it’s pretty easy to look back on our work and pull together a collection of favorites. So here are my favorite photos of the year.

24 selected photos from the Epic Edits PhotoDump Flickr pool. This time there are 24 new members, no new discussions, and 435 new photos in the group.

The theme is “Winter Holidays”, the entry fee is $100 per photo, and prizes up to $50,000!

Links this week include articles on Photoshop alternatives, DIY film, photography books, DIY cameras, film vs digital, lots of photos, and a bit of humor.

The technique outlined here really just applies to a first round of processing — this might be acceptable for posting to Flickr, but a fine art print would require much more time and effort on your part. Also, I’m not talking about doing black and white conversions, crazy artistic interpretations, creative cropping, etc. We just want to make the photo look more natural at this point.

Here’s a small tip for using Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw presets for sharpening and noise reduction settings.

30 selected photos from the Epic Edits PhotoDump Flickr pool. This time there are 17 new members, no new discussions, and 486 new photos in the group.

I recently announced that we were teaming up with the folks from BorrowLenses.com to give out a couple free one-week rentals. In just a few days, we had a great turnout with 152 raffle entries between comments, Tweets, and blog posts. The Twitter entries were a new thing here on Epic Edits, but I think [...]

It is very much the holiday season, and gifts are often a part of that. As photographers, we like to receive certain types of gifts… sometimes equipment, and sometimes things that inspire or educate us. Equipment can be a difficult gift to give because we’re often very picky about what we want. But photo books and photography books almost always please (and good photo books are great even for non-photographers).