As promised in the last of the WordPress Photo Challenge posts I submitted, I am back with a new photo challenge. If one searches the Internet for photo challenges, it seems there are plenty to choose from. There are Daily, Weekly, Monthly and more challenges. I settled on PetaPixel’s 52 Week Photo Challenge. The topics are changed every Monday and the entire year’s collection is available right now. You can find out more about this challenge here. 

Each week, the challenge is focused upon one of five different categories: Vision, Composition, Technical, Creative, and Wild Card. The ‘No Peeking’ refers to treating the camera like a film camera. In other words, compose your image in the viewfinder and ignore the digital display on the back of that fancy digital SLR or Mirrorless camera. I admit to getting lazy about composition. It’s easy to gather more information around the edges and to use post processing to crop and position the final image on the computer. The images featured in this week’s post were composed in-camera with the final image uncropped. In the opening shot, after a surprise snowfall, Bryce Canyon’s famous HooDoos are covered by a fresh layer of snow, the first snowfall of the season in late October.

One of my earliest photo challenge entries back in 2013 featured a different angle shot of this bench. That challenge post involved sharing images captured during the “Golden Hour”, that time of low sun either morning or afternoon. In 2013, getting used to the camera and being quite unfamiliar with photo processing software, I relied on composition in-camera. Learning how to post-process was detrimental in some respects to developing that vision of the final image as it’s too easy to experiment with composition and placement using those modern computer image-processing tools.

Finally, the last image composed in-camera is a small bar on the cruise ship Norwegian Pearl. It was after hours for this bar and something about the lighting along the bar edge attracted my attention. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it for better viewing. I am looking forward to following the new challenge which is designed more for going out and shooting rather than sharing images that have already been taken. I’ll probably be doing more shooting for this challenge than I did for the WordPress version.

We’ll see you a little further on down the blog.

John Steiner