We’re super excited about next week – we have an incredible giveaway and some great blog posts planned. :)

Make sure you take a look to see all the awesome things you can do with her actions, and see some gorgeous photography to boot.
www.ashleymcnamara.com

The winners were chosen completely subjectively – basically they were ones that I really liked the creative ideas that were behind them.

The first winner did an amazing job of capturing the feeling of being left out of a group. I love love love this photo.
Jamie from Ever After Photography wins a set of actions from Ashley McNamara! Jamie, please send me your email address!

And the other winner just tickled me with all of her fun ideas for the Scooby gang.
Congratulations Kayla Bate!, you win The Photo Book! Please send me your mailing address!

We have a surprise giveaway tomorrow, so check back to see how to win!

We have two fun prizes this time, first is The Photo Book. If you are new to photography or self-taught, you would be amazed to learn just how much you DON’T know about the history of photography. This book is full of amazing photos from incredible photographers from the mid-19th century to today. It’s a really neat book, so if you don’t have it already go shoot some toys so you can get it!

The second super awesome prize we have is a set of actions from the talented Ashley McNamara. If you’re not following her blog . . . well, I can’t even imagine that. That’s just crazy talk. Of course you are following her blog. How else would you get the best Photoshop tutorials around and see some amazing photography? Since you’re already following her, you must be really wishing you had her action set by now. She was generous enough to give away a set to a challenge winner here on Two Photogs, so wish no more!

To finish up this post, I’m including my attempt at toy photography from this past weekend. It was lots more fun, yet a bit harder than I expected. I think I’m kind of addicted though, because it was my daughter’s birthday on Saturday and I was eyeing up all her new toys, lol! Next attempt I will try to set up more elaborate scenes with more storytelling.

When we found this blog a couple of months ago, we were immediately engaged. What a cool idea, to take pictures of TOYS!
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-brilliant-creative-examples-of-toy-figure-photography/

As moms, we have plenty of toys around the house just waiting to play subject in a creative portrait. Toys are small enough to be shot indoors or out, and it’s a lot easier to create complex sets for them with the simplest of items.

If you want more inspiration, take a look through Flickr – it’s chock full of amazing toy photography.
Here’s just a few groups we found that sparked our interest:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/danbo-love/pool/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/travellingtoys/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/secretlifeoftoys/

We’ll be announcing the prizes for this challenge next week, and the winners will be announced on April 20th. Contest closes at 5pm ET April 19th. Blog your photos and then come back here and post the link in the comments section.

We can’t wait to see what you come up with – enjoy this challenge and get creative!

It’s been a great lesson to me, and maybe can be to you as well. Honesty rules. You all responded the way you did because my article was honest, and it made me realize that the less pretension the better! I’m pretty much WYSIWYG both online and with my clients, but I have sometimes held back a bit in the past.

In all of this excitement over the blog post, (seriously, we have quadrupled our readership this week) one common theme kept popping up. A bunch of people told me that I was in for some great karma. Then I heard it again yesterday. And as with karma, you kind of think of it as some far away time, maybe even another life when you reap the reward. But imagine my surprise when I learned this morning that I was in for a huge karmic payback!

I’ve been listed as one of the Top 20 in Rangefinder/WPPI’s Fresh Faces contest. My image of my daughter Emma’s first day of school is #14. It just goes to show you what a lucky shot and some good karma can get you! I’d appreciate any votes that anyone wants to throw my way. I don’t care how dorky it sounds – heck yes, I want to WIN! The prize is a spread in Rangefinder and a possible cover. Seriously, who wouldn’t want that? So vote for me if you like the image, or vote for someone else’s if you like it better. Just go vote for someone, because it will probably mean the world to whomever wins!

One final note about the emails I received. They were so heartfelt and sincere that they really inspired me. I’ve recently discovered Jasmine Star (I know, where have I been hiding?) and when I thought about how much the emails that I got meant to me, I figured that no matter how “famous” a photographer got, who doesn’t like hearing that they had a positive effect on another human being? So I wrote her a dorky little note telling her how much I admired her honesty and positive attitude. Class act that she is, she wrote me back the very next day and told me that my email made HER day!

So I’m asking all of you to take a moment to think about who inspires you and to drop them a note. I guarantee that it will mean the world to them. And what goes around, comes around.

Congrats!! I know you will both love this photoshop script.

Thanks again to Malin of Moirai Tools for her generous donation for your amazing readers. IF you did not win, and you have not purchased this awesome script yet head over to the Moirai site and get your own copy now. There are a few other really great things to check out over there like workflow actions and textures too.

First prize: A Fuji Instax Mini
Second prize: A $25 dollar gift card to Photojojo, the store that we are madly, insanely in love with.
Third prize: A $10 iTunes gift card, so you can download some awesome new photography apps for your iPhone.

Yes, it’s true. We are officially awesome. So please, get shooting. You are running out of time to win something fabulous. We will chose the winner based on creativity and all-around awesomeness.
Now go have fun!

We’ve certainly been hyping this challenge up enough, lol. It took us awhile to be able to get to this challenge – we wanted to do it justice and have people be able to participate. The month of January is typically slower for a photographer, so hopefully lots of people can participate in this one! We are still securing some awesome prizes for this contest – we are going to have a first, second and third place – each with a prize! So cool! But we aren’t going to tell you what they are going to be just yet. Let’s get to the challenge!

It’s up to you to make this challenge as complicated or as easy as you want. Use your iPhone, use an old Polaroid, use a Zumi, a Diana, an Instax. Use a point and shoot, use your kid’s Fisher Price digital camera. You just can’t use your regular DSLR (or SLR if you shoot film). Have fun, get creative and don’t get too serious. Don’t think about it too much, just have FUN! There are no rules except you must a different camera other than the one you normally shoot with.

We are giving you a whole month to complete this challenge. Why? Because cameras need to be found, film needs to be developed. You can enter at any time though, and we’re going to limit it to 3 entries per person and they must all be contained to the same blog post.

To enter – just post your image(s) on your blog and come here and link us in the comments section. We can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with! Winners will be revealed on February 12th!

We are also really please to announce that the first Two Photogs online mentoring session has officially SOLD OUT! We already have a waiting list for the next session, so please contact us if you’d like to get on the list! We’ve been working hard on the mentoring side of things and it’s starting to look really awesome! We’ve also finished shooting all of our videos, and we saw the first cut of one of them the other day and are sooooo happy with the way it turned out!

It’s been such a whirlwind few months around here, starting a new blog in the midst of the busy season wasn’t the brightest idea we’ve ever had, lol. We have lots of really cool things for the blog next year, tutorials, interviews, giveaways and more. We are both really excited for 2010!

We wish you all the happiest of holidays, and keep checking back here over the break – we’ll still be posting!

Oh, and we suppose you want to know the winner of the Photographer Cafe contest?
The winner is Jaidean Baker commenter number 33!