Picture This

Shooting sports and action can really put your gear and your timing to the test. But there’s more to a great action shot than simply capturing the moment and making sure it’s in focus. Shutterbug readers showed their fast action shooting skills this month with winning photos that captured a variety of sports, from bike racing to baseball and surfing to rodeo. For this assignment, we wanted to see sports and action images that had great composition, effective use of backgrounds and scenery, and powerful human emotion. Shutterbug’s sports shooters delivered.

Beautiful lighting, in many ways, is what photography is all about. And as our readers proved with this month’s submissions, if you want great lighting, all you need to do is look outside your window. While it’s not entirely surprising, our 10 favorite photos from this month’s assignment are all bathed in natural light. The results are simply radiant.

Without a doubt, this month's Wildlife and Nature assignment brought out the best in Shutterbug readers. There were so many excellent entries, we could've easily picked twice as many favorites and still felt we left some great shots out. In the end, we narrowed it down to 10 wildlife and nature images that truly stood out.

We didn’t know what we’d get from Shutterbug readers for this month’s Low-Light Noir assignment but we knew it would be interesting. And it certainly was! Readers gave us what we asked for, posting a range of dark and moody images that recalled classic “film noir” movies. There were so many great shots, most in grainy black and white but a few in crunchy color, that it was hard to choose just 10 low-light noir favorites but we did. Here’s looking at you, kid!

For this month’s assignment, we asked you to post images that exemplified what famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment,” i.e., real-life subject matter that’s captured neither too early, nor too late, but at the peak of emotion and expression. We got some beautiful moments from Shutterbug readers, including everything from a breathtaking goal line flip during a football game to a poignant kiss between a bride and groom with several unexpected onlookers sharing the couple’s “decisive moment.” Here are our 10 favorite examples of decisive moments from Shutterbug readers.

Backlit subjects can be tricky to deal with which is why we were so impressed with the terrific entries for this month’s “Backlight” Picture This! assignment. We were looking for images where backlight or strong directional light danced with the subject and boy did we get them. From unique uses of sunrises and sunsets to spotlight a silhouetted subject, to plays of light through fog, morning rays through a window, and many beautiful backlit scenes of nature, readers posted some fantastic images on Shutterbug.com for this assignment.

Our Picture This! assignment this month was Panorama and thanks, in part, to some recent technical leaps in digital cameras, we received an array of impressive panoramic images. Some were created with panoramic “sweep mode” (in-camera stitch), which has made creating a panorama as easy as pressing the button and sweeping the camera in front of the vista before you. Others were comprised of a series of images that were stitched together in software on a computer. While there was really no wrong way to do it, because the process has become so easy, many images looked very similar. On the next few pages, check out the grand panoramic images we felt really stood out from the pack.