Webshots Blog

We’re happy to announce the addition of ReCaptcha on Webshots! As you know, we’ve been working on a solution for spam on the site, and several members even suggested implementing this tool, so we hope you’ll be as happy as we are to have it.

ReCaptcha is a well-known and trusted program utilized by over 100,000 websites. What does ReCaptcha mean to you?

Now, when you leave a comment on a photo, album, member message or in feedback, you’ll be asked to type in two words generated by ReCaptcha before submitting your comment.

ReCaptcha won’t stop all spam on the site, but it should help with the majority of the problem, and we’ll continue to work on the issue.

The letters of the English alphabet reveal themselves in unexpected places if you search for them. They hide in the infrastructure that shapes the world around us.

“W” in the Three Sisters

“O” in the Trunk of a Tree

“A” in the Shape of A Building

“U” in the Curve of the River

“T” in the Frame of a Door

“I” in an Architectural Detail

“O” in a Macro View of a Butterfly’s Wing

For this week’s challenge, we ask you to seek out an unintentional letter in your environment. These shapes can be found within a macro view, for example a close up can reveal the letter “O” on a moth’s wings. Or might be found in an everyday object such as a clamp sitting in your desk drawer that might look like the letter “A”. Other letters are found

The main subject of the image should be the letter, not just a minor element within the overall composition.

* Your subject may include more than one unintentional letter in your composition.

* The subject may be natural or man made.

* Feel free to photograph your letter outside or inside.

* Yes, you may photograph your object that resembles a letter as a still life. For example: A funny shaped vegetable or a tool.

* Please include what letter your photo represents in your description when entering the challenge

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Photographs of letters created specifically for the purpose of this assignment are not eligible. For example: No images of letters written in sand, floating in your soup, written in light (light painting) or carvings of a letter(s) in a pepper.

Images such as the examples below which feature specific letters in signs, sculptures or other objects are not eligible.

Let your photographer’s eye find a new vision and “see” a letter where someone else may just see a tree. Have fun this week!

OFFICIAL ENTRY RULES
To officially enter the Creative Challenge, you must tag your three submissions with creative-challenge-alphabet. You can then view them and everyone else’s submissions on the DISPLAY PAGE (it updates about every hour). To find out more about this, read the Using Tags on Creative Challenges post.

Submission Guidelines
1. Our editors look for sharp, clear horizontal images that are at a minimum resolution of 800×600 (submissions can have larger resolutions than this). Currently, vertical images cannot fit in the homepage template. Therefore, we cannot publish vertical or narrow panoramic images.

2. Images with added text or images, including watermarks, logos, copyright symbols, graphic borders, frames and time stamps, will not be considered. Collages, however, are acceptable.

3. Please do not submit pictures that have already been featured on the homepage.

4. The Creative Challenge runs from 1:01 p.m. on September 3 to 3:00 p.m. on September 8 (all times EST).

5. 3 pictures per member tagged exactly (including hyphens) with: creative-challenge-alphabet

*Note:Images that don’t meet the exact guidelines can be submitted and viewed for everyone to enjoy, but please understand that we cannot publish images that don’t meet minimum guidelines on the homepage. Also, now that you’re tagging your entries, you don’t need to post links in the comments section anymore.

NEXT WEEK’S THEME: Golden Hour In photography, the golden hour is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day. The light is typically softer and is warmer in hue at dawn or dusk!

We’re always working hard to protect our members from copyright violations. We recently disabled the ability to right click on a photo and save it to your hard drive because some people were abusing this functionality by re-uploading other members’ images as their own. Your images can now only be right clicked and saved by you and the people you’ve chosen as your friends on Webshots. Meanwhile, everyone else will still be able to download and save your public images to the Webshots Desktop application to use for their screensavers and wallpaper.

Additionally, the “full size” view now shows the image you’ve uploaded in a larger size, but we also store your original size on the back end so that you can create great photo books and gifts in our store with no loss of image quality!

We realize that sometimes you may want to see the image larger than it appears on the photo page but that the full size may be larger than your monitor. For that reason, we’re still developing solutions to allow you to view an image at various sizes. Rest assured, we are working hard to make this site the best it can be for our members.

The team here at Webshots has been busy fixing the issues on the site to make a better experience for you! Drum roll, please, as we list the recent bug fixes:

Email Your Slideshows
When you tried to email a slideshow to your friends and family, you got an error page. It’s now working, so you can share slideshows with everyone!

Sending eCards
Some eCards that were scheduled to send in the future were not being sent, but we’ve figured out why and our engineers have fixed it!

Foreign Characters
We’ve updated our character encoding to UTF-8 so now you can use foreign characters in your titles, captions and tags!

UPPER CASE
We got complaints from members that when they uploaded filed with upper case in them, they would get converted to lower case, so they would have to retype the upper case again. No longer, my friends! USE UPPER CASE ALL YOU LIKE!

Global Tags
When you add a new tag to a photo you’ve already tagged, you’ll now see the globe icon next to it. Click on it, and you’ll be taken to an Explains page featuring photos and albums that share that tag.

Say No to Spam
We fixed some vulnerabilities on the bookmarks page, so now spammers can’t leave spam in them. Have you bookmarked something cool lately? Post a link to your bookmarks below!

Alerts
We’ve fixed issues with the settings keeping when you sign up for alerts, so now you can choose what you like and get it emailed to you or via RSS on a daily or monthly basis.

Help Pages
Our help pages weren’t displaying properly, but we’ve fixed that now, so you can check out all 108 questions!

And those are just the ones you care about! We’re also doing lots of back-end work to make Webshots the best it can be.

Ask yourself these 3 questions:

1. When photographing, have you ever wished for more zoom capabilities so that you could get a few inches closer?

2. Have you ever taken a photo only to realize that the final shot didn’t have the “pop” that you felt was there?

3. Has your composition on a shot felt just a little “off?”

If you answered, “yes” to any of these questions, then let me introduce you to my little friend: cropping. Cropping is one of those tools that enables you to turn your photos from ordinary to extraordinary. Read on to learn the ins and outs of cropping, and check out our tips to help you take the best photo right from the start—no one wants to spend forever in the editing room!

4 Tips for Taking Great Photos

1. Use your zoom lens to frame the photo. If you’re too zoomed out, you won’t have much detail to work with during post-production cropping.

2. Remove visual distractions either physically or by moving the camera’s position. Why bother spending time to clone out a piece of trash when it’s faster to pick it up and throw it away?

3. Don’t crop too tight. You’ll want to keep the final print size in mind when you’re shooting as your camera’s frame may not be the same aspect ratio as many traditional print sizes.

4. Use a higher megapixel setting. This will allow for more flexibility when you’re cropping during post production as well as larger portions of the image to be removed while still providing a sufficient resolution for printing. Of course, the higher the megapixel, the more latitude you’ll have for cropping.

To give you the lowdown on cropping, we’ve invited fine-art photographer Kier Selinsky, who is a member of the American Greetings family, to explain what it is and how you can use cropping to improve your photos. Thanks, Kier!

Cropping 101

Why Crop?

For General Composition (establish a focal point, allow the viewer’s eye to move throughout the image, etc.)

To Remove Distractions

To Establish Context and History (include items in the frame that support the story you’re trying to convey)

For Dynamic Visual Effect

For Preparing an Image for Printing

Whether you’re using pro-level editing tools, such as PhotoShop, or the free tools that came with your computer or Webshots, learning how to crop is an essential skill to learn. In most cases, cropping is as easy as selecting the crop tool and clicking and dragging from a starting point to the furthest point you want to include.

How Do I Crop?
If you already have images uploaded to Webshots, you can use Picnik to edit those images for free.

1. Go to Picnik.com
2. Click “Get Started Now”
3. Click on the Webshots logo.
4. Log in using your Webshots member name and password.

Use the drop down menu to view your photos by albums. Select a photo and then click edit.

Select the crop button to crop the image.

Then click and drag the template to select the portion you would like to crop or scale (if you wish to zoom in on the image).

Once complete, just click on “save & share” to name the newly cropped photo (your original will stay as is). Choose the Webshots album that you want the photo to go into, and then click save—your cropped photo will automatically be added to the Webshots album you picked.

How Much Can I Safely Crop?
The amount that you can safely crop depends entirely on what you want to do with the photo after you’re done cropping it. If you want to display it only on the web, such as on Webshots, or email it to friends and family, then you can crop much more than if you intend on getting prints made.

Cropping for viewing on the web or in emails is rather easy: if it looks good when you do it, then you’re done. However, when considering your print options, there are some guidelines, the first and foremost of which is DPI (Dots Per Inch, sometimes called PPI, Pixels Per Inch). Our expert friends at PhotoWorks, who do the printing for our new store, recommend 200 DPI as a minimum printing DPI.

To find your photo’s largest ideal print size, simply take the length and width of the image in pixels and divide them by 200. For example, let’s say your image is 2000×3000 pixels. Divide these by 200 and you get 10×15, so your maximum ideal print size is 10″x15″.

If you want to know the minimum pixel size needed for a print just multiply instead of divide. For a 4″x6″ print, you’ll need your image to be 800×1200 pixels.

What Do I Crop?

In a word: distractions. It’s the number-one killer of photos. Whether it’s a dreary sky, an innocent bystander or a piece of furniture, if it’s not adding to the composition, it’s detracting. Keep in mind that photography is the art of exclusion—in photography, we cut away that which does not contribute.

Another guide for what to crop is the Rule of Thirds. If a photo is missing just a little something to bring forth your original vision, try cropping to bring the elements of the composition in line with the Rule of Thirds.

Any Precautions?
Just one, really: Work on a copy of your photo, not the original. This is true for many photo manipulations as the last thing you want to do is permanently alter a photo in a way that you decide later you don’t like. So before cropping a photo, or making any other permanent alterations, make a copy of it first.

Do you have any tips on cropping? Would you like to share a photo you’ve successfully cropped? Post below in the comments section!