There are many things that change in our lives from year to year, but one thing is for sure: the Digital Photography Blogs 30 Days of Photos challenge happens every March*.

Taking photos is fun. But looking at other people’s photos is really fun, too. So c’mon—join us! Show us your stuff.

If you’ve been hesitant about jumping into a huge photo challenge (let’s face it, a year is a long time!), then try out just 30 days of photos to get your feet wet. And I’ll let you in on a little secret. We are not all about rules over here. All we want is for people to have fun making pictures. So make the project what you want: take a photo every day, every other day, weekly, or just whenever you can. Commit to it and do it.

You might be saying, “But I’m already taking photos when I can. And I’m busy. You can’t expect me to pick up my camera every day.” But you know what? Honestly, the times in my life when I have improved my photography the most has been during times of consistent shooting, editing and posting.

Take your camera with you when you leave the house today. Challenge yourself to carve out the time in your schedule to take some pictures. I guarantee that if I could get the photo of the berries above while balancing an umbrella in the rain and trying to manual focus my lens, that you can do it too!

And I can also guarantee you will start seeing everything in a new way. The afternoon light falling in between the branches. Your child’s tender smile. The way your cream makes those awesome swirly shapes in your coffee. It’ll all seem photo-worthy once you start shooting more. And since you’ll most likely have your camera with you when these things happen, more often than not you’ll get that shot and you’ll stop feeling like you always miss the good light and the perfect moment.

Are you interested? Introduce yourself here and then head to our Digital Photography Blogs Flickr group to add your daily photos. Not on Flickr? Comment with your blog link, Twitter, etc. where you’re posting. We’d love to follow you.

* Yes, we do realize there are actually 31 days in March and not 30. Call that extra day a freebie if you happen to miss one in the middle somewhere!

Sometimes I want to live where there are dark and moody winter skies, like in my photo above for day 2 in my Year in Pictures project. But I will be content with my sunny 77 degrees Fahrenheit January day. The image below is what the skies really looked like on my neighborhood walk yesterday when I took these pictures. A little Photoshop never hurt, right? With just a tweak of my hue and saturation and an added vignette I can have skies that look a little more brooding and cozy and wintery. I also changed the photo’s orientation to vertical. I thought that my horizontal in-camera framing of the tree branches on the right of the image pointing toward in the empty space to the left would look really cool. But once I flipped the photo so the branches gnarled upward, the photo was much more compelling.

For fun, try playing around with color and orientation/framing in your own photos for new ways to see and experience every day things.

Happy New Year from Digital Photography Blogs!

Here we go, friends. I’m kicking off another Year in Pictures project, starting with this hilarious and ominous Cylon I gave to Chris for Christmas this year. What can I say? We are sort of huge Battlestar Galactica fans.

I’m a glutton for punishment, I think. With a busy toddler and preschooler, an in-the-launching-stages photography business, a stack of books at least 10 high next to my bed and a desire to see my husband each day more than just in passing, I don’t know how I will fit everything in. But I’m so excited to give it a go. My life is pretty busy. (Who’s isn’t, right?) But I think a project like this one is just what my photography has been missing lately. I’ve been lethargic about picking up my camera for anything more than just snapping holiday memories of my kids. And I’ve been even worse about posting. Let’s face it—what’s the use of taken pictures if they are just going to be stuck on your SD card or filed away in a folder on your hard drive to be forgotten about? I’m guilty!

It’s time I got shooting again. It’s time I got inspired again. It’s time I started shooting a little for fun and a little for me. I’ll be posting when I can to keep you all in the loop about my progress and what new things I’m seeing from behind the lens.

And, let’s be honest, how can I back out now that I’ve gotten the Cylons involved?

So…who’s with me?

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