Lavonardo

This entry attempts to catalogue the open digital photography challenges in the web.

Original idea taken from Kameravene.

Corrections, content suggestions and information about further challenges welcome.

Once the challenge-specific archive-pages are up, I will link them here as well.

Considering that it’s ten minutes to midnight on thursday, it’s high time to participate in this week’s photo friday challenge. The topic is found objects.

The attached photograph has a beautiful white seashell, deposited by the tides on a log high on a beach.

The picture in full-size (this has been moderately cropped) is available by clicking on the image.

Meh.

Was looking forward to a new challenge already this week, but the site’s break is actually two weeks long.

A couple of things of interest:

• The header image is now rotated from a collection of ten. Catch them all. Or jump off to the page that shows them all in thumbnailed glory.
• Re-engineered the system that generates a page on movie reviews. It’s not perfect, but good enough, and will be worked on in the future.
• The page on pre-2008 archives is now up to date.

The real spring cleaning will occur once the WordPress 2.5 is formally released.

This week’s macroday challenge is about odd toys.

It took me a good while to get to the grips with the subject - a close-up on the face of a plush Cthulhu seemed to be the best idea until yesterday evening. The irregularly played 2-on-2 table hockey tournament (report pending) provided just the imagery needed.

This week’s photo friday challenge is the good life.

My take on the subject is the attached image, of the last moments of a grand dinner in Boston. The scrumptious key lime pie is accompanied with a glass of calvados, and the dinner itself is on top of a full summer day roaming the Massachusetts state capital. Definitely a slice of the good life.

This week’s thursday challenge is all about green.

My take is the attached image, of a truly overgrown patch of rainforest in the Blue Mountains near Sydney.

I had several ideas about the subject, but figured out that dollar bills are so 80s, don’t own any St. Patrick’s Day gear and the only Kermit in the house is the picture on the first season of the Muppet Show. Hence, yet another image of nature.

Full-resolution photograph available by clicking the image, as usual.

This week’s photo thursday challenge is reflection.

My take on the subject is a dusk-lit glass building in Victoria, British Columbia.

This week’s photo friday challenge is surreal.

Once again the subject of choice is an animal, this time a jellyfish, floating free against a bright blue background.

This week’s thursday challege is games.

My take is the attached image, an overview of the Safecracker-pinball’s playing field.

This week’s photo thursday challenge concerns itself with a long quote from Erland Loe’s Supernaïve. The most pertinent bit of which is “… the list doesn’t lie. I’m satisfied with it. Perhaps the object I’m looking for does exist…”

Having not read the book, my assumption is that the list describes several unlikely objects that the narrator expects to have a serious trouble locating.

This is item #21 on the list: soda with a disgusting name.

Pocari Sweat is a genuine brand from Japan, and despite the name, is not too bad. Especially after a long day in the hot sun.

The hobby of sleevefacing seems to be a bit more involved than I originally thought.

In addition to the flickr-group, sleeveface.com covers the same ground, but with more explanations.

The finnish take has launched its gallery as a facebook group.

This week’s macroday challenge is ticket.

My take is the attached image, a ticket to last summer’s Sauna Open Air in Tampere, the thursday evening headlined by Megadeth. Who played the best gig of the year, easily surpassing Metallica.

This week’s photo friday challenge is fuzzy.

My take is the attached image of a koala bear from the Brisbane Zoo. As animals go, these marsupials are pretty close to the top in fuzziness.

The subject of this week’s thursday challenge is travel.

My take is the attached image, of the best-known Paris attraction lit on a warm May evening back in 2005. Haven’t been back to the french capital since, but certainly am planning a return visit.

As usual, clicking the photograph provides access to the full resolution image.

This week’s photo thursday challenge is hard choice.

My take on the subject is the attached image, of a boat heading into the mist just below the Niagara falls. It took about three seconds to make up our minds whether to go on such a cruise and experience the falls up close and personal.

The blue raincoats did help. A little. But the shoes were sloshing wet for the rest of the afternoon.

This week’s macroday challenge is part.

And what would be a better take on the subject but a lego brick - definitely a part of something bigger, but not of just a single something, but whatever the builder likes.

My trusty S3 is having a hard time in less than optimally lit macro scenes, definitely time to start thinking about something more advanced in this segment.

This week’s thursday challenge is winter.

My take on the subject is the attached image, taken early on a sunday morning in Salem, Massachusetts, after a heavy snowfall the previous night. This is a scene from the suburbia, heavily cropped in the shown version (a nasty wastebin lurks in the background of the original). The semi-focused white blobs on the right side of the picture are clumps of snow falling from the tree.

This week’s photo thursday challenge is joku raja. As an expression that doesn’t translate too well, and my take in the title does require a certain amount of linguistic gymnastics.

Originally I planned to include an image of the zero meridian in Greenwich, but cannot locate the original. And as a mere thumbnail, it’s not that good a photograph. Hence, my choice falls on a badly graffitied train in Brussels. I’m pretty sure that the gity officials would indeed like to apply the same method to the spraycan-wielders as the pink blob is subjected to. (Yeah, the image is quite close to what Juha put up, but I had thought of this before I laid eyes on his…

As usual, the full-size image is available by clicking the photograph, and (drum roll) the archives have not been cleaned out.

n95 proved once again that there’s simply no way a phone camera can behave well in a challenging situation. The dark hall of Kaapelitehdas proved that good photographs are few and far between. A single one (of Mustasch) proved to be of usable quality and has been retroactively inserted into the appropriate entry.