Congratulations to Heaven’s Gate for his winning photo, “Only the clouds for company,” in this week’s contest. We love this breath-taking shot. The colors are so vibrant, the composition leads your eye all the way through the image and the subject matter is so unique. We’re glad Heaven’s Gate had his head in the clouds for this one. Great job!

Congratulations also to budding_photographer’s great macro shot of the barbed wire. We love the colors and the focus is spot on. Wonderful!

Thank you to everyone who participated in our 30 days of photos during March! We had a blast following your lives this month.

Sometimes weeds can be beautiful things. Plain and simple. I guess I knew that already from the frequency in which I photograph dandelions, but today was a good reminder. Camera in hand, I headed out to the backyard late in the day. Low sun, long shadows, good bokeh. I added a slight vignette in Photoshop on this image and boosted the curves just a little, but mostly I left it as is. Taken with my Nikon D40X, 50mm, f./1.8, 1/200 sec, ISO speed 400. The photos below are just more bokeh fun from today’s shoot.

Congratulations to Mehreen.Qudosi! She is this week’s winner in the Photo A Day contest for her beautiful portrait shot. We chose this shot as our winner because of its simplicity, the amazing light, the beautiful model and the soft colors. It’s an all-around amazing portrait. Great job, Mehreen.Qudosi!

Congratulations also to our runner-up, pawoli, for his wonderful black and white street scene titled “Marche à l’ombre.” This image is dark and lonely and stunning. Great job, pawoli!

Keep the great submissions coming. We are truly enjoying looking through them all and seeing slices of your lives. One more week of photos for March. Let’s see what we can come up with!

I’m a little behind on posting some of my daily shots here, but there’s a good excuse. I promise. (Well, besides the weekend and Battlestar Galactica series finales to watch.) It’s officially spring! And been heading out and enjoying it as much as possible. Most photographers I know love to be outside using as much natural light as they can find. And spring is such a great season for that. Don’t get me wrong, I live in Southern California and we tend to get some pretty moderate climate all year long. But there is just something about knowing it has officially changed seasons on the calendar that puts me in a great mood. I love winter, too, and all the moody, darker photos you can get during those gloomier months. But I’m ready for some brightness. I’m ready for the obligatory flowers. I’m ready for some color. And so are these lemons. They are just about ripe in my front yard and ready for picking. And photographing, too. Of course.

Camera: Nikon D40X
Exposure: 0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture: f/4.0
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed: 200

Water. Clean, clear, cold.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the conveniences we have in our lives, all the things we take for granted. In this struggling economy, it’s easy to freak out about what we don’t have or what we might have to do without for a while while times are tough for our nation. But what about all the things we do have? Even that glass of water sitting next to my laptop that was so easily retrieved by pressing a filter button in my refrigerator.

Did you know that each of us in American uses about 80 gallons of water daily? That’s enough to sustain 16 African families for a day. While we go into the kitchen for a quick drink, a mother in Zimbabwe travels miles in search of water to save her baby.*

This photo was a simple still life shot taken directly under a lamp to give it that cool glow. I sharpened everything in Photoshop to make it crisp and then did a simple black and white conversion to draw your focus right to the water and not to the different colors of walls and wood.

Camera: Nikon D40X
Exposure: 0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture: f/1.8
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed: 800

*The facts above were provided by World Vision, a non-profit humanitarian organization that fights poverty and injustice throughout the world. You can donate to their clean water fund to help safeguard the health of mothers, children, and entire communities by minimizing waterborne illness and providing clean, drinkable water.

We took a trip to the park yesterday to enjoy the sunshine. At one point as I was lying in the grass I couldn’t help but stare up at the interesting trees above me. A gnarled, wonderful mess of branches and leaves just waiting to be climbed. The sun was shining directly on those branches, which gave me some good contrasting shadows and highlights. I lightened the image a bit in Photoshop and then desaturated the colors to give the whole thing less of a jarring, bright mid-day feel. I like the way the muted colors feel in this. To me, they give the photo more of a timeless feel, just as trees should always seem to adults remembering their childhood climbing days.

Camera: Nikon D40X
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture: f/4.5
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed: 200

And when the Jasmine blooms around here, I definitely know spring is near. I wish you could smell this photo because it’s glorious. Mmm…

I took this photo toward the end of the afternoon when the light was soft. I boosted the curves in Photoshop and then also added a boost to the color. Then I added a vignette to bring out the white of the flower and sharpened the Jasmine and the leaves immediately surrounding it to make it pop even more.

Nikon D40X
Exposure: 0.02 sec (1/50)
Aperture: f/1.8
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO Speed: 200

Congratulations to the tahoe guy, this week’s winner in our Photo a Day contest, for his shot titled “Peach Blossom.” This shot acould not have come at a better time. We are so ready for spring and this photo just bursts with the color and energy of the upcoming season. We love the bright colors and the perfect little blooms. Great job, the tahoe guy!

Congratulations also to last week’s winner, kenh571, who is our runner up this week for his shot titled “Closeup of Cardinal.” The depth of fiend and the pop of red color are amazing in this shot and really make it stand out from the rest. Way to go, kenh571!

Thanks to everyone who diligently posted daily photos to our group pool on Flickr this week. They are so fun to go through and get a small peek into your lives. Keep them coming!

A quiet room, a comfy chair, and some soft light is really all anyone needs at the end of a long day, am I right? This is the scene that I regularly see now while putting my son to sleep at night. The Daylight Savings time change might have totally screwed up my kids’ sleep schedules, but at least I now begin my son’s bedtime ritual in this gorgeous soft light, as opposed to the darkness of just a week ago. Just walking into a room filled with this diffused light puts me at ease and makes me want to sink right into that rocking chair. (And did anyone notice that open window? Yes, we’re officially at the open window stage in pre-spring!)

To make this photo, I opened up the aperature on my 50mm lens all the way to f1.8 on my Nikon D40x to allow the maximum amount of light in (at 1/250 seconds and 800 ISO). I knew it would still be a dark image because there was not a lot of light to work with in the room, but that was the feel I was going for—dark, calm, gentle, sleepy. The exact things I want to remember about this time in my baby’s life as I lay him down to sleep.

Sometimes an old pie tin full of colorful crayons is all you need to make you smile. I took this photo at my daughter’s pre-school during craft time. There’s just something about all those colors that makes me dream of what I could create. I’m not great with a crayon (seriously, we’re talking stick figures wearing funny, baggy clothes), but I can handle a camera. So I just photographed them instead! I first adjusted levels and curves a bit for some better contrast and then ran a color boost action to pump up those great colors and make everything pop! I also ran a sharpening filter on the front crayons to make everything really crisp. When I first walked up and saw the color of those crayons I thought, “BOLD!”, so I wanted to make the photo I took of them just as bold as those great reds and yellow and magentas!

Nikon D40X, 50mm, f3.2, 1/30 sec, 200 ISO.