Contest update

In the first 3 days of the contest, already over 50 of you submitted your version of the photo I provided. There are still two weeks to do so, so if you want to join the fun, and have a chance to win a Everyday messenger bag, just head over to the contest page to check it out :)

New 3440×1440 wallpapers

According to the page stats, every day I get visitors to the site, looking for 3440×1440 wallpapers. And as I know how hard is it to find wallpapers at that size (as I have the same resolution on my monitor) here are two more I added to the selection :) Get them from the wallpapers page.

You will also notice a little reformatting of the wallpapers page. As it was getting a bit too long, I have implemented and accordion menu, where you choose the aspect ration you want, and that part of the site is displayed for you.

Last time to submit your photo is today (7th) at midnight GMT.

Contest sponsored by Aurora HDR from Macphun & Trey Ratcliff

Thanks to Macphun & Trey Ratcliff I have for you another round of my editing contest. And to make this one bigger and better, you have even more days to submit your entry this time, plus there are great prizes for you.

Aurora HDR is the newest HDR software available, just named by Apple as one of the Best Apps of 2015. Aurora HDR is very powerful, works as a standalone or as a plug-in and gives you start-to-finish editing tools.

For those who are not familiar with Macphun and Aurora HDR, Macphun are the creators of many great photo editing applications and plug-ins. Aurora HDR is their newest creation built in collaboration with Trey Ratcliff, one of the most popular HDR shooters around.

For more information on Aurorar HDR Pro, you can check out the official Aurora HDR website, and my Aurora HDR review, that I posted some time ago.

You can also download a trial version of Aurora HDR and try it out right away. The download is available from the Aurora HDR website here. Currently, only a MacOS version is available.

When you are done playing with it, here is how you can enter the contest. For those who have joined one of my other contests in the past, the rules are the same!

How to join the contest

1. read the complete rules first :)
2. download the provided series of brackets showing a view of the blue hour Dubai Marina in Dubai, here from Dropbox
3. edit them into a final HDR photo (you can use any software and any technique, tone-mapping, blending, exposure fusion, black&white version, use the Aurora HDR trial, etc…)
4. join the contest event on Facebook here and post your photo into the event or send the final edit to me, under miroslav.petrasko@hdrshooter.com with the subject “HDRshooter contest” (please don’t post the full size version, 1500px wide is enough)

Only one entry per person is permitted. Please don’t use parts of any other than the provided photos. If you post your photo to the event page and want to change it later, you can delete your submission and upload a new one. If there is more than one from a person, the last one is entered and all others will be deleted.

Winners & Prizes

Jury selection winner will be selected by a jury of great photographers:

• Conor MacNeil from TheFella.com
• Jonathan Danker from Jonathan Danker Photography
  
• Anthony Gelot from A.G. photographe

The jury selection prize is an Everyday Messenger bag by Peak design. A premium day-to-day essential carry workhorse, The Everyday Messenger is for photographers, travelers, commuters and everyone in-between. I also use this bag, and you can read my impressions of it here.

People’s choice winner will be selected by fans on HDRshooter Facebook page, where everyone can vote for their favorites (once all the entries have been submitted). This voting will be in a newly created album, not in the contest event. Sharing of your entries further to promote them is permitted, but entries with fake likes will be disqualified.

This winner will receive a Parrot Jumping Sumo Drone by Parrot. This is a very cool, remote controlled, two wheeled, jumping drone by Parrot. Just check out the official videos, and you will see how much fun you can have with one :)

How long do you have to submit your entry?

The latest time to submit your entry is  7th February 2016 at midnight GMT. The voting on the winner will be held during the week from 8th to 14th February 2016 on the HDRshooter facebook page. The winners will be announced during the week starting with the Monday 15th .

I hope you will all have fun editing and good luck to you all :)

I reserve the right to change or amend the competition rules at any time without prior notice. By entering the competition, entrants agree to be bound by these rules. All participants can’t use the original or final photograph for any commercial use and have to give credit to me as the original author, also I will not use their versions for any purposes other than promotion of this competition. Participants can share the photo on their Facebook, blog, flickr or other accounts, but still have to give me credit as the author and link back to the contest.

Update : After reporting the matter to Instagram, my copyright claim was accepted and the stolen photo was removed from the service. I hope all other affected photographers did the same and reported this user for copyright violations.

I said I hate this topic, but the story evolved from yesterday, so I thought I will post an update.

So looks like the person who used my photo (and other photos from other photographer) without permission, without credit and was quite a jerk about it by deleting comments and changing his Instagram account to private, is a more widely know person in Croatia. So once more photographers started to complain, the local news sites in Croatia picked up the story and published articles about it.

So I have been bombarded by questions, comments and really nice messages from Croatian people who are really disgusted by how he behaves. But here are few answers.

No, I don’t plan to sue him. Not worth it, to spend the time and effort on such a person. I still plan to submit a copyright claim, but not sure how to, as he changed his account to private, and so I can’t link to the offending photo. I think the news coverage will be punishment enough.

I hope he learns his lesson and stops profiting from other peoples work. But since that will probably take a while, and right now he still claims that he is the author of all the photos, here is an undeniable proof that I’m the author, which he can look at while doing such claims :) (sorry for the huge watermarks, I don’t want to give him anything to work with)

So first, my final photo and “his” edit.

Screen-shot of the original RAW image:

And a screen-shot from the photo series, I took that evening:

And for those curious, who also speak Croatian, you can find an article about him here, here and here. Most include examples of other stolen photos by him.

I like to do this every year, and 2016 will not be different. As time changes, my ideas change, so does this blog. So today is the time for this years update. If you look around, you will already notice what changed, but here is a little rundown:

1. New home page – the whole organization of the home page has changed. Now it no longer shows just the latest posts, but it features a random selection of posts on top (or some that I want to point your attention to if needed), the recent updates, most viewed and most commented posts, direct links to top photography pages, and a selection from guides, reviews and process posts. If you still prefer the old way, just click on the BLOG in the main menu, to see just a list of the updates.
2. New categories – guides, reviews, process posts and tops spots are now handled as categories of posts. Like this I can create and overview easily, and they are updated automatically. So no longer you will see just a text list, but nice picture grid of whats available.
3. No more site color – the new site is only black&white, with red links. There are no other colors used. Now, I leave all the colors just for pictures
4. Faster load time – now the site should load faster as before, as the high quality images are available only directly in the post they are included in. All other images, show in previews, overviews, lists, menu and similar, are highly compressed versions, downsized for the particular use
5. Related posts – each post now shows related posts under it, based on categories

And there are many many more small tweaks. My main reason for the changes was, that since the blog already has 2000+ posts, with many guides, review and other articles, everything that is not on the front page gets lost in time. So my goal is to provide a better gate, through which also these can be discovered, and shown to you, the visitors. I really hope that this will work :)

But a little side note. While changing the theme, I also started some needed cleanup tasks (for instance, some posts still used the old blog address, which caused slowdowns and similar), and those are still in progress. So it can happen, that if you access some of the older posts, that there can be images missing, or the formating could be a bit off. I’m working on correcting any problems like those, but it will take a little time, due to the huge amount of posts. I’m also still tweaking few small things, as it’s hard to find all issues without having the theme on the live site. So there will also be few small changes here and there over time. Please have a little patience with me :)

Regrettably, the new theme uses a different post view counting method, so all posts will show 0 right now, so don’t be surprised.

I hope you all will like the update, and we will have a great year 2016 together :)

If you are still in the New years mood, here are two high resolution wallpapers for you. Both are formated exactly for the Surface pro 4, but since they are both quite a high resolution, they will look fine on any screen up to a 4K one.

You can download them, with all the other available wallpapers from the Wallpapers page.