Welcome everyone! It feels good to be back and I’m looking forward to seeing so many great images this year. With my mind visualizing so many wonderful submissions I’ve found it hard to narrow it down to few key topics for the upcoming digital night. But alas, I did come up with four. This year I’m also going to try to define these topics to help you get connected with the subject, understand what I had in mind and hopefully spur your imagination so that you can sumit images that fit into the theme but may be of a nature that I hadn’t even imagined. As always, I’d like to challenge you to think outside the box, stretch your skill set, and even experiment with your photography.

This months themes are as follows:

The first is ‘long exposure’. Long exposure is a technique in photography that isn’t limited to just one genre but can span a variety of them. It can be used to create light trails in cityscapes, smoothed water in seascapes, star trails at night, blurred movement in streetlife or sports, and abstract photography. And, if you know me you’ll know I have to mention that long exposures are easily created with a cell phone, either through an app on an Android or built into the iPhone’s ‘Live’ feature. There are many possibilities.

The second is one we’ve not had for digital night and that is ‘culinary’ photography. This may not be a known genre cause I kind of made it up but the definition of culinary is “of or for cooking”. What I envision are images of food that will make our mouths water or restaurant scenes showing people meeting over food, or even cutlery images that can be quite artisitc. Let your imagination go!

The third one is ‘line’ images. To quote from The J. Paul Getty Museum website, “A line is an identifiable path created by a point moving in space. It is one-dimensional and can vary in width, direction, and length. Lines often define the edges of a form. Lines can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, straight or curved, thick or thin. They lead your eye around the composition and can communicate information through their character and direction.” I thought to break this topic into segments so that we can show a number of images under each type of line, such as: vertical line (VL), horizontal line(HL), vertical and horizontal line(VHL), diagonal line(DL), and curved line(CL). To determine which sub-category your image fits into look for the dominant type or another way of thinking of it is, look to the line that draws the viewers eye the most.

The fourth theme this month is before and after images with specific criteria. We have done this category in the past but the criteria for this month is more specific. Your image change must be one of the following: 1) an addition of an element (i.e. add a bear); 2) an obvious change in colour, texture, sky, or filter; 3) an extensive crop. Many members have editing software but in case you don’t, here is a link to Wix’s website that provides a list of 10 free editing software, along with the pros and cons for each.

Lastly is the ‘open’ category. So if your image doesn’t fit with this month’s theme, send it in under ‘open’.

Members can submit up to 3 images in the ‘long exposure’, ‘culinary’ and ‘open’ categories, up to one image in each of the ‘line’ sub-categories and 3 pairs of ‘before and after’ images..

Send them in and let’s enjoy seeing what everyone has photographed.