Picture This

Here’s a photo assignment that was for the birds. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Yes, we were looking for images of birds and we wanted your best shots.

One of the most important things in photography is composition, and windows and doorways can be great framing devices for your images. Much like a picture frame, a window or a doorway can be used to draw the viewer’s eye to a subject. We’ve seen them used for portraiture or landscape photography to great effect but, for this assignment, you were free to use them however you liked.

There’s a thin line between seasonal photographs being cliché or stunning. We, obviously, asked you to come up with something stunning for this assignment. As the name suggests, we wanted your images to showcase any of the four seasons: spring, summer, winter, or fall. 

Trains are an ever-popular photography subject but we didn’t want to limit this assignment to just one mode of transportation. Instead, we decided to do a riff on the Christmas movie classic “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and let readers decide which speedy subject they wanted to shoot. We weren’t, necessarily, looking for action shots of these vehicles for this assignment but adding an element of motion in your images did not hurt. 

Despite all the advancements in imaging—including the advent of color and the now dominance of digital—there’s something about classic black-and-white photography that will never go out of style. That’s not to say that just because a photo has been shot or converted to monochrome it’s guaranteed to be a great photo. The choice to go black and white must have some meaningful relationship to the subject matter or scene to be effective. For this assignment, we asked readers to submit their best black-and-white photos that use the dramatic impact of monochrome in a powerful way. Our six favorite images here certainly show just that.

Fine art photography is a broad category of imagery that can include landscapes, cityscapes, macros, wide angles, long exposures, abstracts, portraits, nudes, semi-nudes, black and whites, color photos, surreal photos, hyperreal photos, nature photos, and on and on and on. But what we were looking for with this assignment were simply beautiful or striking images that showed your vision as a photographer. 

Without a doubt, the most popular images on the Internet (aside from cat photos) are of sunrises and sunsets. What is it about these daily acts of nature that so inspire us? It’s hard to say but easy to see.