For this month, January 2021, the theme challenge is “Your Favorite 2020 Photos”.
This month the theme challenge is different from our previous challenges, instead of creating one image this month your challenge is to review your images from 2020 and choose thirteen (13) of what you consider some of your favorite images and then create a collage. This will lead into the creation of your own calendar which will be the Photo Challenge for February.
One of the ways to create your collage is by using PhotoscapeX (free version) and the four images template. Create three separate collages with four images, then use your cover image and the three separate saved collages to produce your final collage showing all the 13 images as seen below: (note set your collage of four images size to 4″x6″ 300dpi (1200px X 1800px) with a spacing of 5px, margin 0, roundness 0, background white and opacity 100. Then drag and drop your images and for each set of four images do a save as)
This year is the first year in about 10 years that I have not created a calendar just for the simple reason I did not want to be in contact with many people delivering calendars due to Covid-19. However, this is always a great process to go through each year because it forces us to review our images and cull them down to our best or favorites from the year. By reviewing and doing self assessment of your photos from the year, 2020, you can learn a lot.
Next month, February, our photo challenge will be to create a calendar from the thirteen photos we chose from this months challenge. We’ll go through the actual steps creating it so you can enjoy it all year long. But first we need to choose our images, so lets get started and pick your favorite or best images.
During the culling process and once you have a potential selection, make sure that the image size is a minimum of 7″x10″ (2100px X 3000px) this will provide enough resolution so you won’t see any low resolution errors when you upload your images to create your calendar in next months challenge.
Students are encouraged to develop their ability to tell a story or invoke an emotion, as well as how to plan and troubleshoot while creating their images. So send in a small collage of your images and tell us any stories about the images that you want to share.
As always with our monthly theme challenges we try to seek out an instructional resource, below are a number of YouTube video links to help with some hints and ideas (these are the same videos that were recommended in last years post).
Picking and Printing your Best Photos instructional aids:
■ How Reviewing your Photos will Help your Photography: by Nigel Danson (13min 43sec)
■ Why selecting your TOP 8 Photos Helps your Photography: by Nigel Danson (15min 8sec)
■ Printing Photos will Improve your Photography: by Nigel Danson (18min 59sec)
An important part of improving your photography is not only practice but also self assessment and reflection, which is the intent of this months theme challenge. In addition you have an opportunity to learn more about the images you are creating; identify what you are doing right, what you need to improve so you can correct it in future images, and what you like about your images which helps define your style.
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