Introducing Challenges

Row of hand weights. Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash
Photography

Hello everyone! I have added something fun to get us out shooting over the summer and beyond: Challenges.



Challenges are a new feature on the website and have no connection to our regular club competitions. It's a just for fun way to challenge yourself to shoot more and try new things. They're not judged or scored but you can show off your images in the galleries.



There are currently 3 types of challenges: Monthly, Weekly, and Daily.

  • The Monthly Challenge has one theme that runs through the entire month. The monthly themes are broad to promote diverse images and are generally relevant to the given month.
  • The Weekly Challenge has one theme that covers that week. The weekly themes tend to be based on photographic techniques or specific topics, sometimes related to calendar placement.
  • The Daily Challenge has one theme for each day of the month but the photos do not have to be taken on the day listed. Think of it as a "scavenger hunt" for the month. See how many you can get! Of course, you can always try to take them on the designated day for an extra challenge.



The rules are as follows:

  • Only members can upload to the gallery, though the Facebook group non-members will be able to play along on Facebook.
  • Photos must be new photos taken during the challenge's time period. The whole point is to get to taking photos so no cheating and using old ones!
  • You may upload multiple photos for each challenge but please be courteous and don't flood the galleries.



Photos are to be uploaded to our Smugmug gallery as I don't have enough free space at our hosting provider to add tons more photos. I am working on integration with the website but, unfortunately, I've spent the entire day on this and still didn't manage to get it all done. It was a bigger project than I expected!  I will post the upload links to the initial challenges at the end of this email so you all can get started while I finish up the website part.



To prep your photos:

  • Set the title/caption/copyright on your photo before exporting. You can do this in Lightroom and likely other editing software. I'll work on some tutorials for how to do this.
  • Exclude from export anything you don't want to display of title, caption, copyright, keywords, exif data.
  • Choose a good file name, preferably including your name for easy identification.
  • There isn't a limit on resolution but anything more than 2000 pixels wide won't show on most devices.
  • Photos are not allowed to be downloaded and right click is disabled but it's impossible to completely prevent theft. You can watermark your images for extra protection if desired.



Important: Since photos are uploaded anonymously, you will not be able to make any changes once uploaded. You will need to email me if you need to change something so please check everything over carefully before you upload.



Here are the challenges that are active this week. I expect to have the website integration done by next weekend so look for the rest of the challenges there.



Monthly: 



Weekly:



Note: We are starting on week 40 because I want the weeks to start along with the camera club year on Sep 1 so that puts us at week 40 of this camera club year.



Daily:



Happy shooting!



Michelle Cox

Secretary and Website Administrator