Image by ashley rose

This weekend your photography challenge is to take an share an image with the theme of ‘EYES’ (theme suggested by Brenda on our Facebook Page).

You’re welcome to take the theme in any direction that you like – the eyes might be yours, a friend or family member’s, an animals, or you might to do something a little more abstract – it’s totally up to you.

Once you’ve taken your Eye photos – choose your best 1-2, upload them to your favorite photo sharing site and share a link to them here in comments below.

If you tag your photos on Flickr, Twitter or other sites with Tagging tag them as #DPSEYES to help others find them. Linking back to this page might also help others

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If you’re just learning photography and you feel that learning to use your DSLR camera on manual is too daunting, here’s a little tip I used when learning to think for my camera: let the auto settings guide you. By auto settings, I mean the ones where the settings are set for certain situations and you don’t have to do anything else. These include portrait, macro, sports, landscape, etc.

Take sports mode for instance. On a Canon 500d, the sport mode while I was indoors at the time was set at: f/3.5, 1/320th sec, auto ISO.

What can you learn from this? A fast shutter speed captures and freezes motion quickly. When I first was learning about why my camera used a smaller f/stop in sports mode, I was confused. Landscape …

Over the last 6 months here at dPS we’ve launched two downloadable E-Books:

• The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography
• Photo Nuts and Bolts: Know Your Camera and Take Better Photos

Both have been downloaded and appreciated by thousands of our readers and in doing so have helped to keep dPS funded as we move forward – thanks so much to those of you who have purchased them.

One of the most common requests we’ve had from readers about the E-Books is that people want to buy both of them and are wondering if we have a discount for that type of purchase.

Today we’re trialling this option and are offering 25% off when you buy both E-books at once. That makes the two E-books together $29.97.

That’s real value as …

Which of these great E-Books would you like to win?

This week I’ve got a great little competition for you which will put you in the running to win one of two great E-books. Bruce Percy has produced a great range of photography E-books and has been generous enough to give us a few copies to give away to our readers.

All you need to do to be in the running is to answer the question – which one would you prefer?

On Tuesday (midday Melbourne time) I’ll randomly choose 4 of those who respond who will win a copy of the book they choose (two winners for each E-book).

Your choices are:

1. Simplifying Composition – The Elemental Components of a Landscape
2. Nocturne – Mastering Low Light Photography

One entry per person please!

Check out more information

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Few kinds of photography have a more dynamic power than the area of Portraiture.

Portraiture is the medium through which we photographers endeavor to tell the stories of our friends, our family, and our clients. Through this art, we have the ability to capture a likeness of someone that will last for generations to come.

So, is your portraiture worthy of this calling?

Developing the art of portraiture requires a great deal of time and effort. Developing relationship to perceive the true personality of our subject. Creating the perfect likeness. Achieving the most dynamic final product for print.

Daunting? Perhaps. But technology is on our side in ways like never before:

Portraitists, meet the High Dynamic Range Portrait.

HDR portraits may seem more work than worth the effort. This is further than the truth. There are many programs …