Master The Light Webazine

Welcome to the re-launch of the Master of Light challenge. As most of you who have previously been involved will know,  the challenge got interrupted mid way due to circumstances beyond our control and the attempt to re-launch in the form of a news letter just proved to be more work than one person could handle.

The solution, get more people involved and integrate the challenge into the new webzine we have started. The benefits of this are many but the benefits to you are that we can extend the deadlines for submissions giving you more time to complete each challenge.

For those of you who are new to the challenge, let me give you a little bit of history as to how it came about and what its aims are.

It has been a great concern of mine for a while now that many aspiring and some long time photographers grab onto, well let’s call them trends or fads that pop up from time to time in the hope that it will improve their photographic and lighting abilities.

The most recent one of these is Strobism. Don’t get me wrong, Strobism is probably the best thing that has happened to the photographic community and the Strobist website is probably one of the best resources that you can find but there is a catch.

Strobism in its true form is the art of using Speedlights (flashes that we normally use on camera) as off camera lighting. All well and good but Speedlights due to their design have some inherent problems and you actually need to have a pretty good understanding of lighting to be able to work around these problems.

The irony is that if you have this grounding and understanding you will soon realise that you won’t want to limit yourself to any one type of lighting and will start using and modifying light sources that you have around you instead of relying on one type of lighting.

The second thing that I often come across is the “I can’t shoot like that because I don’t have the right equipment philosophy”.

Again if you understand the basics of lighting you can, within reason, make light do what you want it to and you can get the same lighting effects that the photographers with the expensive gear can get.

So to help everyone get up to speed, I came up with the concept of the Master of Light challenge which would even the playing field for all photographer s and take everyone back to the basics which is essentially that light is light and if you understand it, you will be able to work with it.

The challenges have been designed as a fun way to learn about lighting and the first challenge which was lighting with a candle really got the pennies dropping for many photographers.

For those of you who are just joining us, I would urge you to go back and do the previous challenges as you will learn a lot from them.

So how does it all work?

There are a series of monthly challenges from which a first, second and third place winner will be chosen and will each receive a voucher from Graficomp for printing up to the value of R1000 (see the prizes page for more details).

At the end of the monthly challenges which will be the end of August, the first place winners will go into a final round where they will compete for the title of Master of Light.

The first and second and third place winners for the final challenge will be in line for the great prizes that have been donated by our sponsors but we are still working to see if we can come up with consolation prizes for the rest of the finalists.

The Winners will be announced on the Hp Stand at the 2010 PHOTO & FILM EXPO which will be held at the Coca-Cola Dome between the 15th & 17th October.

We have made some changes to the way the competition runs which can be found on the Rules page but the main one of these is that Entrants will now need to register to be able to enter the challenge.

On registration, you will be provided with a unique number that must be used as the file name for all your submissions. The reason we have chosen to implement this is that we want the judging process to be totally anonymous so that no-one can accuse the judges of being biased. we were also getting entries in the past with no names or contact details other than an email address and this new system will be used to ensure that we can identify each entrant when the need arises.

All that I can say further is head over to the registration page, register for your unique entry number and then go to the challenges page to enter the May challenge.