Congratulations, JP!!

Congrats JP, well deserved, - only one thing worse than not winning............

Hooray, jp! Great win. Looking forward to your new topic. Thanks Daniel for the great challenge!

Congrats JP! I knew that fine shot would do well the moment I saw it.
And many thanks to Daniel for another fine job as host- take a well deserved rest now :-)

Congrats JP - Nice shadow image - perfect for the challenge! :-)

Your turn JP, congratulations for a well deserver winner!!!.

good luck!!

Oh yes, we have lots of flashlights and candles but it would be nice to have the generator to run our computers, keep track of things on TV, and run the freezer if needed. ohhhhhhhhh the lights are starting to flicker! ;-)

Carole - do you at least have some flashlights? After living through hurricane katrina, I bought a couple of large crank style ones and a crank radio!

47 degrees here in N. CA with high wind warnings out for the Sierras, and here in the foothills, and with lots of local power outages - maybe we'll lose our power too. I wonder where the generator is? ;-)

That means 10°C, nicer than here in Buenos Aires when we have been standing 36°C (100F).

One day long without comments here. Everything is in stand-by mode.

Brent and Martin: thanks for your support :-)
Carole: take it easy, you donīt have to apologize.
Rod: I donīt agree, I have enjoyed your shots and also Ernestīs :-)

Bleeding L I've just got me super main frame computer sorted out (almost) & the bleeding challenge has ended, I was getting prepped to get some proper picys cos I luv the shadows topic. Anyhow I've just slept for 14 hours straight catching up for all the missed sleep this computer has caused. Martin if you need an assistant computer tech I will help you out mate, mind you it will cost you heaps in upgrading mate:-)
The galleries do look impressive a except for the girly picys me & Ernest posted:-) Now I will go & vote before me computer crashes:-)

This has been one of the most enjoyable expeireinces that i have had in quite some time. Thank you ALL for the opportunity to get involved in what I believe to be one of the most fullfilling endevours of my life...PHOTOGRAPHY!!!! Looking forward to the future of Pixelpeep!

Now the leader has 11 points so all is well! ;-)

Martin - the lead image has 0 points! ;-)

Sorry for the minimal participation Daniel - no matter what the weather, I couldn't get out for shadows - I guess I should have tried a studio shot but after seeing all the good ones in the gallery, I didn't see anything around the house worth photographing. :-(

Bahh, thanks for regularly playing in the challenges, Brent. It's funny... code... *one* wrong character and you crash an entire database, which is what happened as soon as C27 went into voting mode, because of the aforementioned glitch. I hate coding. If I could go back and go study again.............. who am I kidding? I'd just drop out and be a street sweeper or hotdog vendor.

I'm feeling a bit better over the last 12 hours or so but drowsy from medication. I think the weather finally did me in. Not a day of sun here since around the start of january, which really isn't typical here, to have a long stretch of overcast and snowy weather. Hell, one reason I fled Canada was because of the winters... now it's come here too ;)

Well, I put in my votes (great images again, all!), now back to zzzZZzzzz...

Hey Daniel,
Some of us didn't get a lot of direct sun during this challenge that is true, but we all made do just fine in other ways. I know I still had some fun and enjoyed seeing what others came up with.
Martin, hope you are feeling better soon! Thanks for fixing our silly voting widgets ;-)

I'll give it my best shot, Daniel ;). I don't think it's going to be a problem to sort everything out by feb. 1st.

RE: waving people icons and "how am I doin'?" bars are back in operation. Turned out to be just a very small glitch.

Ok Martin I appreciate you havenīt forgotten of it!. Iīm going to take my vacation on February 1th, but if I can get the Topaz before, no problem. Some time will be.

Folks, during the 'best of' time period, I made quite a few updates, some of which could not get completely tested since they were voting-time functions (and there was no voting stuff going on during the 'best of', meaning those things until now have gone untested). Fortunately it appears that the voting widget is intact and doing its job, which was the #1 concern. However, under your 'voting' tab, you currently can't check how your entries are doing (no animated hot/cold bar, no waving people icons ;))... something went wrong in that area and I'll try to patch it sometime tomorrow. I've been bedridden the past 48-60 hours so I'm not up to doing anything right now except going back to sleep. If anyone's missing the waving people, may it comfort you to know that I am here waving at you to make up for that ;)

If anyone experiences weird things with the voting widget etc., please post here about it with some details.

Daniel, I meant to write you many days ago, since you're hanging around right this minute I just want to give you an FYI that my email to Topaz has been returned twice as not reachable to their server. They may be having some mailer problems but I'll try again this week. Hang in there, man ;)

People I donīt want to interrupt you but the votation period has just started. So I must say thanks for participating in this challenge, and I know some of you have been having difficulties for shooting because of season issues (not too much sunlight overthere). So I really apprecciate the efforts you did to get pictures that fit the topic.

Thanks JP. I decided to go for it even though they don't get any "soak" time with the audience.

Tomorrow, I start a graphics design class with the local college from a great teacher my son recommended over Christmas ... so that I can keep up with the likes of you guys. I'm worried that they may brain wash the left side but I am promised some re-modeling on the right half. Also I'm part way through a great book I discovered on Amazon at the beginning of the year, Michael Freeman, The Photographer's Eye ... some of you might have noticed.

So I had to go to another gym this morning since ours is closed for cleaning. I got there in the dark but the morning sun had worked its magic to show me on the way out. Then I get home and look in the shower and our frosted window is doing its thing ... pretty sure that is the neighbor's roof line making that corner. Here is a 4 - picture sequence taken with my G9 [link]

Hey! As I write this there is a knock on the door and my Panasonic GH1 is back ... what a long week without it.

Now the sun comes out! Here it is the waning hours of the challenge and I finally woke up to mostly blue skies for the first time this challnge after a big wind storm last night seemed to blow all the clouds away. And now I have to go to work, oh well.
Agree with Penny, there are some fine shots in the gallery :-)

So wow, I've just gone through most of the gallery again... there are so many terrific pictures! Voting will not be easy.

Sounds like you are getting things sorted out in your system Rod. Have you also upgraded to the latest firmware for your motherboard? Theses things can drive you nuts!

Thanks JP, I just went to the paper shop & bought a gamers mag with an attached game demo DVD & have just spent the last hour playing Dirt 2 a world cup rally game. I'm now very tense & elated, tense because games seem to make me uptight as I can't seem to steer a car or shoot too many people & elated because the graphics card & computer performed a treat. The graphics in that game are terrific so everything is honky dory now except when I first turn on the puter it doesn't make it into windows & freezes, I have to restart & it seems to go in on the second try. I did some Raw conversions on my 18mp files & instead of a near 30 sec wait in DPP for a sharp preview it was almost instant. Loading the 16 bit Tiffs into PS was also a breeze so I really needed an update I suppose but it was a strange way to go about it. Overall I'm quite pleased now. Now back to picy taking, wot's the topic:-)

You call that a tragedy JP!!! A tragedy is when you spend $200 on a graphics card to speed up me old computer & it gives me hell so I have to upgrade to make it work & to be on the technology curve for once & guess wot! $1300 later & the bleeding thing is still playing up, sort of. Blue screens of death lock ups & failing to post & some funny glitches but after being up half the night & all day to day I seem to be getting somewhere. There's a conflict going on with the drivers I think & from reading on the net quite a few people with the same problem with my card & ATI drivers. Its possibly the graphic card drivers so I will keep my eyes open for updates. Once I'm in windows the computer runs great, it's been running now for about 8 hours without a problem but I can guarantee that when I start it up in the morning I will get the BSOD & then when I'm in it seems to runs fine. Ive done stress tests on the graphics card, memory & anything else that can be tested & everything comes up normal. I've even overclocked the bugger to see what happens & it didn't miss a beat. I will have to buy a PC magazine that has a CD with game demos on so I can see how the card handles those as a final test.
Wot a bugger a but me mind feels good from all the exercise & dementia might be further away than it was last week:-)