Webshots Blog

Winter wonderlands can be very difficult to photograph—have your photos ever ended up with dark snow or cast in a blue haze? The culprit is the bright lighting conditions in a snowy scene, which can fool the exposure and white balance settings. To capture the memory the way you actually see it, follow these helpful tips—you’ll never be afraid to say, “Let it snow!” again.

Adjust the Exposure
Camera meters will always strive to expose for a middle tone. Your camera doesn’t recognize whether or not something is suppose to be dark or light, so if you’re pointing your camera at snow, it’s going to expose it as if it were suppose to be gray. If you were to photograph something black, it would also appear gray. Photos of snow are typically overexposed, so use the exposure compensation button to decrease the exposure.

Set the White Balance
To avoid the blue cast on your snow photos, find a patch of clean, white snow and use that to set your White Balance for your day of capturing winter wonderlands. Be sure to watch out for shadows, though, as that can effect the White Balance setting.

Learn More
Want to know more about the ins and outs of snow photography? Check out this helpful essay from Digicamhelp.com as well as some photography tips before the next snow fall.

Photo walks, a popular activity among photo-sharing communities, let us all be a part of something no matter where we are in the world. By taking a walk this weekend and sharing the pictures with us, you’re contributing to a global mural of life.

So put on your walking shoes, grab your camera and go for a walk. You’ll be surprised at the photographic opportunities that present themselves. We’d love to see all of your photos as you can submit as many as you like!

Please tag your photos with Weekend Photo Walk 5 and then post your links in the comment section. Your entries won’t be judged—this is just for the fun of it!

The Creative Challenge Winner’s Circle editors’ collection features the top-three winning members from each Challenge. As you may know, the Creative Challenge has been an evolving process, and when it first started, it was designed to just be a fun activity on the site. Slowly, we added more Challenges about different types of photography, such as Black & White Photos, and got great feedback from you that you enjoyed trying new techniques.

We soon realized that we had to find a way to share all these amazing photos with the greater Webshots community, so we decided to feature many of the entries in the Think Green Creative Challenge and the Black and White Creative Challenge in editors’ collections.

Think Green editors’ collection
Black and White Gallery editors’ collection

If we could put together an editors’ collection after every Challenge, we would, but we knew we had to find a better way to reward the top members. So starting with the Creative Challenge: Action, we announced that that winning photo would be displayed on the homepage!

From then on out, the winner of the Creative Challenge has been featured every Wednesday on the homepage, and many of the runner ups and other entrants have been featured on the channel pages and had their entire albums featured—it’s a great way for the editors to find new members and fresh content!

We hope the collection of winning members inspires you to take many pictures over the holiday break so you can be ready to go for 2008! To make sure everyone got into the collection, we had to make Holiday Spirit the last Creative Challenge of 2007. But we’ll give you a head start on the first Challenge of 2008: New Year’s Resolutions. Show us pictures of what you resolve to do (or not do!) next year, whether it’s eat less chocolate or hit the slopes or travel the world more!

Happy Kwanzaa to all our Webshots members! If you’re celebrating this day with your friends and family, be sure to upload cute pictures like this one and tag them Kwanzaa.

Want to learn more about tagging? Check out our Tag It page to learn the benefits of organizing your photos using tags.

We’d love to see and hear about your celebration. Please share links to photos and comments with us!

We hope Santa brings everything you want…and more! Enjoy our editors’ collection featuring holiday images from members like you. Have a safe and happy holiday.

Want to share your favorite holiday memory? Let us know in the comments section!

by member anario106

Photo walks, a popular activity among photo-sharing communities, let us all be a part of something no matter where we are in the world. By taking a walk this weekend and sharing the pictures with us, you’re contributing to a global mural of life.

So put on your walking shoes, grab your camera and go for a walk. You’ll be surprised at the photographic opportunities that present themselves. We’d love to see all of your photos as you can submit as many as you like!

Please tag your photos with Weekend Photo Walk 4 and then post your links in the comment section. Your entries won’t be judged—this is just for the fun of it!

The Creative Challenge Winner’s Circle editors’ collection features the top-three winning members from each Challenge. As you may know, the Creative Challenge has been an evolving process, and when it first started, it was designed to just be a fun activity on the site. Slowly, we added more Challenges about different types of photography, such as Black & White Photos, and got great feedback from you that you enjoyed trying new techniques.

We soon realized that we had to find a way to share all these amazing photos with the greater Webshots community, so we decided to feature many of the entries in the Think Green Creative Challenge and the Black and White Creative Challenge in editors’ collections.

Think Green editors’ collection
Black and White Gallery editors’ collection

If we could put together an editors’ collection after every Challenge, we would, but we knew we had to find a better way to reward the top members. So starting with the Creative Challenge: Action, we announced that that winning photo would be displayed on the homepage!

From then on out, the winner of the Creative Challenge has been featured every Wednesday on the homepage, and many of the runner ups and other entrants have been featured on the channel pages and had their entire albums featured—it’s a great way for the editors to find new members and fresh content!

We hope the collection of winning members inspires you to take many pictures over the holiday break so you can be ready to go for 2008! To make sure everyone got into the collection, we had to make Holiday Spirit the last Creative Challenge of 2007. But we’ll give you a head start on the first Challenge of 2008: New Year’s Resolutions. Show us pictures of what you resolve to do (or not do!) next year, whether it’s eat less chocolate or hit the slopes or travel the world more!

The holidays are alive and well on Webshots! Your entries in the Creative Challenge: Holiday Spirit put us in the festive mood, so before we choose our top three winners, we all drank eggnog, sang songs and pranced around like reindeer. OK, not really, but we did have a good time looking at all your photos!

#1. The colorful lights reflecting off the snow-covered trees create a festive mood on this quiet winter night captured by member wolftinz. The moon adds to the overall beauty and elegance of this shot, making it a standout winner. Congrats to member wolftinz—we’ll feature you’re photo on the homepage tomorrow.

#2. We really liked the unique take on the theme “Holiday Spirit” by member andrei_sky. The photo has all the elements of the holiadys—such as a glowing candle and leaves that looks like mini Christmas trees—and we like the pun on “spirit” as in a good, stiff drink!

#3. Can’t you just feel the spirit in the cool night air? We loved this holiday scene by member klattu103. Simply stunning!

Thanks to everyone who entered the Challenge and shared their festive photos with us. To see all the entries in the Creative Challenge: Holiday Spirit, visit the DISPLAY PAGE.

Before Graphita
After Graphita

‘Tis the season for snowmen and colored lights, so while you’re decorating your home and front yard, why not add a little “holiday” to your photos, too? Graphita, one of Webshots’ partners, lets you upload photos from your computer, add fun graphics to them and then save them directly to your Webshots account!

The site has a bunch of fun new holiday items to enhance your photos, and its easy drag-and-drop interface makes creating fun. I made the above image in less than 10 minutes and was “laughing all the way!”

Once you’ve made your image, just choose the “share” option, enter your Webshots member name and password, and little elves will magically move your Graphita photo to your private inbox on Webshots, where you can then move it to another album and make it public.

But don’t let the fun stop there: Email it to your friends and family, make it into prints and gifts (mine would make a fun holiday card, no?) and encourage everyone you know to Graphita their photos, too!

I’d love to see what you can do on Graphita, so share links to your enhanced photos in the comments section!

by member maxonline101

Photo walks, a popular activity among photo-sharing communities, let us all be a part of something no matter where we are in the world. By taking a walk this weekend and sharing the pictures with us, you’re contributing to a global mural of life.

So put on your walking shoes, grab your camera and go for a walk. You’ll be surprised at the photographic opportunities that present themselves. We’d love to see all of your photos as you can submit as many as you like!

Please tag your photos with Weekend Photo Walk 3 and then post your links in the comment section. Your entries won’t be judged—this is just for the fun of it!