And the winner is… (drums rolling) comment #44, which happens to be Sally Clark (sallycphotography.com). Congratulations Sally, you won a $250 gift card from B&H. I will be contacting you via email for your contact information. Your $250 gift card will be sent to you by mail directly from B&H! By the way, I love your infant pictures – you have a great talent. The girl with glasses on the front page of your site is adorable!

We will soon host another giveaway, so stay tuned! Off to writing my long overdue Nikon D5100 review.

In addition, Lola and I are planning to give away a couple of great prizes to those who make it to the workshops. Please make sure to glance at our schedule update post periodically, as some of the details might change. I will be emailing those who signed up in advance and will let you know if there is a change of venue or time, etc.

So far we have had one small workshop called “Introduction to Photography Workshop” at the Roxborough State Park and although we did not have a chance to record the session, it went great and we went through the photography basics in approximately 4-5 hours. The next two workshops will be conducted this coming weekend, on June 11th and 12th (Landscape and Portrait/Wedding Photography) and the final workshop will take place on June 18th (Flash Photography).

Here are the B&H Contest Rules:

1. Post a comment below with a list of items you would buy from B&H. Something like “I would love to buy a Nikon 50mm f/1.4G lens with a filter” or you can put a list of the gear you want to buy as a list.
2. Make sure to use your real email address in the contact form – otherwise we won’t be able to get in touch with you.
3. The contest is open to anyone – the gift card number will be emailed to the winner.
4. You do NOT have to buy the items you list in your comment from B&H.

If you remember, the purpose of this giveaway is not only to help one person, but to try to help every photographer that wants to have a blog. During this process, I will be taking snapshots of every step, so that I could then lay it out for everyone else to do it on their own.

Here is Jered’s comment:

Hi –

I’ve been a long time reader and greatly enjoy your photographic and writing work. I would very much like the chance to get your help on a photography blog.

I’m currently living in and traveling around Europe with my wife. We saved up as much money we could around our wedding, got plane tickets, and made the jump. We bought a car, and now we’ve taken to a nomadic lifestyle of sorts, staying with friends here and there, trying to pursue our goals and see what happens. I’m a cycling journalist, I write a lot for different magazines and websites, but my main goal is to push my photography forward, not just in cycling, but hopefully in other genres as well.

I’ve posted thousands of pictures to my Flickr page, and I do have my own website, but I’m not sure how to make the juncture between the two. I would greatly love to combine the two, as I’m beginning to see that it would be a much better solution.

Anyhow, thanks for your generous offer. I think we’re all very grateful for your help.

JERED

Congratulations Jered! I will send you an email, so please respond as soon as possible so that we can get started.

And to those who did not win – please do not get disappointed! Hopefully my guide will be detailed enough for you to be able to do it yourself and I will do my best to help along the way.

1. I need the lucky winner to be an example or a showcase, so to speak.
2. I will build a blog for the winner using a hosted service through a hosting company like GoDaddy or 1and1 (or whoever the winner chooses).
3. The blog will be built using WordPress – the engine that runs most of the blogs on the Internet today.
4. I will install a theme selected by the winner and will do all of the necessary configuration for the blog to work properly.
5. I will build a very basic structure of the website to get started.
6. I will also install most of the plugins I personally use and recommend.
7. I will configure the blog to be SEO-friendly and will submit the blog URL to the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing).
8. While setting it up, I will take screenshots and write down each step of what I did (obviously, all private information will be hidden).
9. I will then create a very long do-it-yourself, step-by-step article and publish it on this blog, along with a link to the created blog.
10. I will provide a 1-2 hour training session to the winner for him/her to be able to independently post text and images.

So, by doing this and creating a step-by-step article, I will also help everyone else who want to have their own blog to post their work.

Some of you might be wondering why one might need a self-hosted blog like this, when you can use ready websites such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com to host your blog without having to pay monthly hosting fees and deal with other headaches. First of all, there is a big difference between a free hosted blog and your own self-hosted blog. The big part is customization – you can choose your own look/theme or pay someone to create one for you. Hosted blogs will typically force you to use their own themes and won’t let you customize your installation. On the subject of themes, none of the free hosting services I know of offer good blog themes for photographers (please correct me if I’m wrong). Next, is ability to use your own plugins – there are literally thousands of great free plugins that are currently available for WordPress that you can use on your own website. Free hosted blogs do not allow you to install your own plugins. I could go on and on about the benefits of a hosted solution…if you want to find out more, just search for some info on Google.

Anyway, before you read the rules, here are some disclaimers:

1. The winner must agree to pay for the domain and hosting. I will obviously help to choose a very reasonable hosting package (as low as $5/month).
2. If the winner already has a domain and a hosting account, he/she will need to provide the required logins/passwords (passwords can be temporarily changed for me).
3. The winner must be able to provide basic information (such as name of the blog, initial usernames/passwords, etc) that is required to build the blog.
4. The winner will either have to find a free WordPress theme or pay for a commercial one. I will NOT work on any theme customizations. I will make recommendations for photography-ready themes.
5. I will NOT work on code changes and other customization that requires any kind of programming. Not that I can’t, but it just takes a lot of time that I simply don’t have.
6. I will NOT work on or create any logos, artwork or any other type of images.
7. The rules and disclaimers of the giveaway are subject to change any time.

Now giveaway rules:

1. Leave a comment below with some short info about you and your photography business/hobby (you can hide your name). If you can, write why you need a blog.
2. If you have any questions, post them in the comments section along with the above info without creating a new comment (only one comment per participant).
3. Make sure to leave your valid email address in the “Email” field for me to be able to get back to you (not required if you are authenticating through Facebook).
4. The giveaway deadline is November 30, 2010. Winner will be selected randomly.

I know this giveaway is unusual, but I think it will be very beneficial for those who are getting started in the photography world!

Good luck!

1. The image was not very straight due to poor framing
2. There was too much noise in the image (although shot at ISO 80)
3. The colors were way off and there was too much magenta in the image
4. The corners were very soft

Here is the original image:

Maroon Bells iPhone Original

For those who want to see the full file, click here to download the file. Overall, it is not too bad, but I am not used to this kind of quality, so I opened up the image in Photoshop and did the following in 10-15 minutes:

1. Straightened the image
2. Removed the noise from the sky and water
3. Removed the magenta from the mountains and lightened up the green colors
4. Desaturated the sky and the water a little bit, because there was too much blue in the water reflection
5. The stone in the water below the peak reflection did not look good, so I removed it using CS5′s new content-aware spot healing
6. Cropped the image from top and bottom a little bit to get rid of the edge softness
7. Applied sharpening to the image

Once again, here is the final result for comparison:

Maroon Bells Modified

If I posted the original image without modifying it, everybody would have voted for the iPhone, since it would have been too obvious :)

Here are the final poll results:
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

63% voted for iPhone, so I must have done something wrong with the image that still gave it away :) Anyway, let’s move to a more interesting subject – who won Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography 3 book?

And The Winner Is…

We have two of them – I decided to award one book to a person picked by a random number generator who voted for the iPhone (per original rules) and one more to a random person who guessed it wrong (we thank you for trying). So, here are the winners:

• Jim (#33)
• WebMonster (#9)

I will write you an email, so please respond with your full address, so that I could ship the book to you. Congratulations Jim and Webmonster!

Maroon Bells, July 2010

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Here are the giveaway rules:

1. Select one option from the above poll and vote.
2. Leave a comment below with your name and your email address and explain what you chose and why. If you don’t want to write a long explanation, just say what you voted for.
3. Only do the above once, duplicate comments will be disqualified.
4. In a couple of days I will close the poll and select everyone who gave the right answer.
5. I will then randomly pick a person from the selected list and announce the winner.

The prize is Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography Book Vol. 3 – will ship it anywhere, even internationally. Good luck! :)