Congrats RK! Stunning image - it could be a poster for the Louvre! Looking forward to your challenge.

And a big "THANKS" to Daniel for excellent hosting! :-)

Wow! thats a pleasant surprise. Thanks all and specially the host, Daniel its going to be a tough act to follow. Give me a couple couple of hours to come with a topic and setup the galleries.

Congratulations to all place-getters and everyone who participated.

Congratulations RK! I knew that beautiful image was going to be the one to beat the moment I saw it. I'm happy to see a Nikon win this round and look forward to the possibility of adding more Nikonians to the peeper fold that may bring. With a little luck you might not be mid-flight to your next destination now and will be able to give us a juicy new topic we can sink our teeth into ;-) Well done!

Congratulations RK!!!. You can probably find more congratulations here:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1009&message=33607020

Our pretty ladies Penny and Debie are very anxious waiting for the new topic, and Rod, John R. and Jill want to try their new cameras, so do not delay too much...:-).
Daniel

ok folks, if anyone's interested in the final, FULL version of my gallery package, it's here, free for pixelpeep challenge members for a limited time (a few weeks max):

[link]

You will need a hosting account on a Linux-based web server (it may work on some configurations of Windows servers but no guarantees) and about 15-20 minutes RTFM'ing ;). Once you get the idea of it (the instructions for use are minimal), it's dead simple to use. Enjoy, and let me know how it goes!

I'll be setting up subscriptions as well, where anyone who wants to use this app but doesn't have web hosting can have a subdomain at pixelpeep.com with the app set up for you and an FTP account to upload your photos. A subdomain is something like this: rodbam.pixelpeep.com. Anyone interested in getting hosting with this, let me know. I don't know how to price it yet but I'm thinking around 15 bucks per year for about 2gb of space (which is about 6000 images if you were to keep them at 300kb or so, less if you went larger (there won't be a restriction on file sizes, just on total space used))

RK!!! - Congratulations on a fine image (actually more than one fine image although only one of them won).
Evidently, though I haven't had a chance to try it yet, the new challenge setup is extremely quick and easy and can be done from any one of the many international places you might happen to be in right now!!!

Please don't forget to remind everyone that the thread will be moving to Nikon (tv is going to be happy about that, I think.... oh wait he never talks in the forums, so maybe not but..)

We are really looking forward to a new topic....

Congrats RK - NEW TOPIC PLEASE

I recently came across an little article on Flat Light that sums up nicely one of the CTC previous challenges. I know, that is those other guys but I do notice a lot of familiars from that other place and thought you might find it interesting. Nothing new but nicely summed up.
http://www.techrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=3305

Bonehead I am... ignore the original download link, this is the correct one: [link]

Oh Carole, patience is a virtue & I don't have any of those:-)

It's over at 1am your time Rod so maybe you will wake up to a new shiny challenge if the winner sees the results and is able to start things up right away. Be patient! :-)

I expect you to never believe anything I say.
When is this challenge ending? Surely it must be soon a.

Rod - you told us they were magnificent so what do you expect.

You lot are terrible calling me out to show me holiday snaps, I just say they're magnificent but they are all rubbish. I will put some through some PS filters to turn them into ahrt & post them in the main fred. I'm still going through them, & I'm tempted to go back to shooting Jpegs as with this many picys it's a real pain PPing. And I now have to show Mereana how to give her picys a basic PP like USM & a bit of contrast but I don't want her's to look too good:-) I will post some as soon as I get em through PS. Now I have some extra PPing to do as I have to try & sharpen the rock behind the bikini girls:-)

Rod, how about posting some picys in the thread of your holiday, and Merena's picys too. We'd all really like to see the girls in bikinis when you said you were trying to take that "rock" picture. Are the rocks in focus.......or the girls? ;-)

ooops.... just checked... I think one of my little people dove into an abyss... gone missing... ouch.

thanks for thinking of a work-around. I noticed that Rod used his drop box already for this purpose but didn't think to link his picys here. So, good suggestion ... I knew it wouldn't really be viable to have a whole gallery of unrelated nonsense anyway.

On to my next suggestion.... have you thought of a place HERE to link to the forum thread so that anyone with any camera could find it easily?

A pending gallery eh, Penny? ;)
That's a lot of additional work and I'm not keen to have the space used up for personal stuff, it would just add to the costs here and/or prevent me from adding some other features because the server this is on will be overloaded. But, if someone wants to occasionally show some pics unrelated to the challenges, try using the dropbox to post a series of pics and then post the link to them here. Key word here is "occasionally" ;)

Catching up on some posts here... ;)

Ivan, regarding the hotmail/yahoo accounts, there are two reasons for not accepting them:

1) they aren't really "email" accounts, rather just web-based messaging services. They occasionally change protocols for strategic reasons (for example, hotmail could make it so that all gmail messages go to a recipient's spambox) and these changes usually break mailing functions from within web apps... so if someone registers here with a hotmail/yahoo account, there's about a 99% chance they won't receive the welcome email that the server here sends out. If they want to recover their password (which is something that's not available here yet), emailing password recovery instructions to a hotmail/yahoo user becomes a crapshoot as you don't know if instructions will ever be received.

2) almost everyone who has registered here with duplicate accounts has used fake hotmail or yahoo email addresses to do it with. It's just one way to have less of this happening, even though realize this could be done using other email services, even gmail. For those that have hotmail/yahoo accounts, I figure it wouldn't be a really big deal to get a gmail account if they really wanted to register, and to be honest, I wholeheartedly recommend using gmail for email vs. other web-based services.

Hope that makes sense ;)

Yes John I also want to know about your new toy...Congratulations!. I bet you are very anxious for the new challenge to start...

I must have missed it...which camera did you get, John.

Looks like your new camera is going to deliver some good quality for you John- congrats. It will be interesting to see how it performs in low light for you- should beat the regular point and shoots without being too much bigger. I expect you should be able to get some nice narrow DOF out of it too. I just got a G11 a couple of days ago (not nearly so pricey) and think it will be very usable up to iso800 (1600 tests aren't so bad actually) but narrow DOF I'll never get out of it save for macro.

My new camera got here last night. Spent the morning reading the manual since it has been awhile for something fancy. Then went looking for a camera store to get a case. They are gone all but one still exists ... we had about 15 within 15 miles of me less than 5 years ago. The one that is open said they have a year to switch all their equipment to dry ink or they will be out of business too. Wow.

Here are some pics from this afternoon [link] turn "embiggen" off using the options top right ... flickr has a real problem expanding a 1024 to full screen

i see u guys have nothing to d - like me

I want to see Rod's pictures!!! Can we have a pending gallery, Martin? Please!!

What it happend here Martin was that I had never payed attention to the votation period when I participated in the challenges, so I chose the recomended period instead of starting to think of what would be better. Next time (if there is any) will be.

80 bleedin' entries? Good job Daniel and all, and with only 4 upload slots per person vs the old 6! Seems like a pretty comfortable number, I figure 100 entries per challenge would be the bursting point and make voting a little hard. Let's see if we can maintain these levels and hopefully get a genre section opened up!

Oh, btw the 3-day voting default... ooops! I set it to 3 for the first 'open' theme just because there was a blending of challenges at that time and thought an extra day for voting might be a good idea for that one. I forgot to set that default back to 2 days (but the host can override this stuff any time). I'll set it back to 2 pronto, in the meantime this one will have to endure the extra 24 hours. I could set it to 2 if everyone wanted to, I'm just thinking since it's "set in stone" for #21, it may be best to just let it go 3 days so no one's surprised by an early result...

Hey Rod, I just found out you got banned from the combined Canon challenge. Good idea to combine, utterly stupid idea to restrict membership. I have to be candid, the group of CSLR'ers that are uncomfortable with you being around are little whiners and not worth the time. Glad to have you here, just don't call my photos "girly" shots eh ;)

You guys and your obsession over those waving little people ;)

As was mentioned, there's 5 (or is it 6) different people icons, they're generated randomly and each one represents nothing more than a voter who has given points to your image. If you hover over them, you'll get a little tooltip telling you the total number of people who voted for the image.

The percentage range is based on the leading image at the time... if it says that the leading entry so far has 50 points awarded to it and your bar shows 80-100 percent, it means your image is either that one with the 50 points *OR* you're close... within 80% of the 50 points at least, meaning your entry has 40 or more voting points (40 of 50 is 80%). If your entry is sitting at 40-60, it has anywhere from 20 to 30 points (20 pts is 40% of the leading 50, while 30 points is 60% of 50). We can't display an accurate percentage, otherwise there'd be no fun in keeping ourselves in suspense, right? ;)

Daniel and Brent, got your last emails, I will reply in the next 24-36 hours, promise. I have a whackload of stuff to take care of and it's late here right now, so hang on an itty bit.

At this point I have no control over the votation period. But I´m going to email Martin asking him if he can do it for me. I hope he reads my email soon...