JPG: Open Themes

Out of Place (In Issue 32)

Sometimes something just jumps out. For this theme, we're looking for photos where one thing looks out of place, like it doesn't belong.

Pretty Ugly (In Issue 32)

We’ve all seen it: something that's considered 'ugly' is actually quite beautiful when you look at it the right way. And let’s go ahead and admit it: it’s easier to create a nice photograph of a subject that has great beauty to begin with. For this theme challenge yourself by looking for beauty in unexpected places, and create an amazing image of something that some consider to be less than lovely.

Fabulous (In Issue 32)

Marvelous! Supreme! Fabulous! Sometimes, one word says it all. Show us your most fabulous photos, the joyful takes that are so over-the-top incredible, they can only be described as Fabulous. Fabulous was a theme in the JPG Early Issues, and you can check out all the amazing photos that captured the people and details that make life fabulous (starting on page 67). We're excited to start bringing back some closed themes so all our JPG members can show their stuff, and what better theme to start with than Fabulous?

Photo Challenge: Financial Focus

Focus on money by Tim Scott Finance, Money, and Numbers. During a time when millions of Americans still operate with the recession in the back of their minds and the economy is still said to be weak – Facebook makes history going public with an IPO price that valued the company at more than $100 billion. Also topping the financial news chatter this May, U. S. Mortgage Rates fell to new record lows since the 1950’s. Greece faces financial turmoil that may push the rest of Europe’s economy drifting downward, and America’s exploding deficit is the at the forefront of this year’s presidential election debate topics. For this week’s photo challenge submit any photo that has anything to do with finance, money or numbers. Closes June 10, 2012

Photo Challenge: Centered Composition

Contact Lens: New Orleans, Louisiana (Mississippi River #1: Accordion Player) by Gary Joseph Cohen Placement of the subject within! While looking at a scene through your viewfinder, you'll probably see several choices for positioning your subject: left, right, high, or low. One of the most widely used rules of placement is the rule of thirds. Inspired by a previous Story of the Week selection written by Gary Joseph Cohen, we're rejecting the coveted rule of 3rds and asking you to submit any photo where the main subject is smack dead in the center of your composition.

Photo Challenge: Triangle Tour

Layered Triangles by Deborah Downes The triangle has had a huge impact on societies and civilizations since the beginning of time. In ancient Greece, for example, art was to be as perfect as possible and any work of art from that era was to have a specific compositional balance in order to please the eye. This led artists to create and believe in the rule of the Golden Triangle. A triangle's influence can still be seen in many aspects of modern day life. Show us your take on this simple shape. Be on the lookout for the triangle and work one into your photograph. Closes May 28, 2012

The Celestials

Sponsored By: The Smashing Pumpkins
Submit your best photo to visually represent the track "The Celestials". This 13 Set Photo Challenge Series is based on the song titles of the upcoming Smashing Pumpkins Oceania album due out June 19th. Enter your photo for a chance to be featured on a limited edition print-on-demand canvas poster signed by The Smashing Pumpkins! Corgan by Scott Spychalski Follow JPG and The Smashing Pumpkins on Facebook and Twitter from now until the June 19th to find out when the remaining photo challenges will open! (see rules and submission guidelines) Back to Themes and Challenges

Panopticon

Sponsored By: The Smashing Pumpkins
Submit your best photo to visually represent the track "Panopticon". This 13 Set Photo Challenge Series is based on the song titles of the upcoming Smashing Pumpkins Oceania album due out June 19th. Enter your photo for a chance to be featured on a limited edition print-on-demand canvas poster signed by The Smashing Pumpkins! Follow JPG and The Smashing Pumpkins on Facebook and Twitter from now until the June 19th to find out when the remaining photo challenges will open! (see rules and submission guidelines) Back to Themes and Challenges

Quasar

Sponsored By: The Smashing Pumpkins
Submit your best photo to visually represent the track "Quasar". This 13 Set Photo Challenge Series is based on the song titles of the upcoming Smashing Pumpkins Oceania album due out June 19th. Enter your photo for a chance to be featured on a limited edition print-on-demand canvas poster signed by The Smashing Pumpkins! Follow JPG and The Smashing Pumpkins on Facebook and Twitter from now until the June 19th to find out when the remaining photo challenges will open! (see rules and submission guidelines) Back to Themes and Challenges

Community Critique

Do you have a photograph that you want feedback on? Enter it here! Understanding what others think of your work can help you grow as a photographer, so this is a space for people to receive or give constructive criticism. ***Please note: this is meant to be a safe place to give and receive feedback, so please be polite! You may like something or you may not, but you must to be respectful when commenting.

My Favorite Mistake

It’s happened to the best of us: you fire your shutter a millisecond too late, you accidentally hit a button that throws your settings off, or something just goes terribly wrong. But most of us have discovered that these mistakes can also be happy accidents that end up giving you a great image. For this theme show us your favorite image that you initially considered to be a ‘mistake.’

Recurring Theme: From the Pit

Whether you grabbed a great shot from the crowd or scored a VIP pass, share with JPG the best photo you created at a concert! We want to see the cutting edge musicians of today, whether their songs are overplayed on the radio or they’re still basically unknown. Next time you head out to see your favorite band, bring your camera along! This will be a recurring theme in future issues of JPG Magazine! Please make sure to include with your photograph who you were rocking out to, where you were, and when it was!

Consumerism

As the current recession approaches the holiday season, many people are reconsidering their spending habits. This time of year is also a strong indicator of the economy and consumer confidence. For this theme capture what consumerism is today, and its affects on our culture and lives.

In Uniform

Institutional clothing is all around us... and much of it has become iconic. The school girl, the soldier, the fast food worker, and the flight attendant each wear a distinctive uniform. For this theme, take a unique photograph of a person in uniform.

Create-A-Filter

Get ready JPG - for this theme we are taking you out of your photographic comfort zone!For decades, photographers have altered the light, color, and focus of their photographs by building filters out of different combinations of materials. These days there are so many amazing filter effects in Photoshop that it's easy to forget that we can create innovative new effects ourselves.How, you ask? Take the space between the subject and your camera lens, and make it your own! Do it with a homemade filter! Plastic, films, fabric, gels, nylon stockings, dried milk... there is a world of possible effects you can bring to your image. You can even use floppy disk or slide film to make infrared or color filters. So brainstorm, create a filter, snap some photographs, and submit your favorite filtered shot to this theme! Make sure to write a caption about what you used to build your filter. If you make a number of filters or want to show the effect of a particular filter with a before-and-after sequence, then consider writing a how-to story. Please, please, please no store bought filters for this theme! We're excited to see what you come up without the help of Photoshop or the fancy accessories you can purchase at a camera store!

Ripple Effect

The combination of water and light in photographs can oftentimes produce fantastic and jaw-dropping results. So show us your best image of a ripple effect, and let everyone enjoy the magic of this seemingly mundane combination!

Member-inspired: Shoot Your Pet!

Though pictures of puppy dogs, kitty cats and sunsets tend to overwhelm most social photo sites, we still wanted to give our members an opportunity to submit the most intriguing photos of their beloved pets. So be creative! And show us a fun image of your furry, scaly or feathery best friend.

Day 1/365

We all know photography is an excellent method of documentation. So, imagine documenting a full year of self-portraits -- your year -- in photos. Inspired by Stephen Poff's 365 project, we wanted to have a place for people to share a photo diary of their year in self-portraits. Take a photo each day (or take more, but select your daily favorite), number it (example: 23/365), and add it to your photo stream. The result? A collection of images fully representative of your life. Submit your favorite to this theme, with its accompanying number in the title, and share your year's journey with other JPG members!

Feature: The Ones We Love

Here at JPG, we've come across an amazing photography project called The Ones We Love. For this project, the wonderful Lindley Warren asked photographers to share six photographs of the person most important to them in a natural or outdoor setting. The photos, combined with text describing the person, is so beautiful and inspirational. There were a few JPG members amongst the group, and more of the photographers from that site have started sharing their stories here on JPG. We want to see your take too! For this feature, write a story describing your loved one and include six photos of them. Then, submit one of your favorites from the six to The Ones We Love theme.

Feature: Gadgets Galore

We know all you techie-obsessed photographers are out there. Those of you who shrieked with glee over the GPS enabled bicycle cameras. And cried out over the new Canon 5D Mark II, the highly anticipated camera that shoots HD video. And were awestruck over the Eye-Fi, that amazing memory card that uploads pictures from inside your camera when you're in a Wi-Fi zone. There are loads of new shiny gizmos out there and we want to hear all about them! We prefer the latest in camera technology, but we want to know about any gadgets that are knocking your socks off! For this theme, descriptions are required and we'd love for you to include a short review. If you have a longer review or example photos, please write a My Precious article.

Title Me!

Theme suggested by Rob Roy and Joven Delacruz. We all know not to judge a book by its cover, or in JPG world, to judge a photo by its title. However, a title really can say a great deal; in fact, it's the best way to convey what you want your photograph to say. For this theme, we want you JPGers to work together to come up with the best titles for your photos. Here's how it works: upload an untitled photo to the theme. Look through other photos, and suggest what you think would be the perfect title in the comments section. After a week when the theme closes, go through your comments, pick your favorite title, and edit your photo description, adding your shiny new title. We'll pick our favorite image-title combination. Get creative, get collaborative, and get your title-making skills on. This was originally a one week photo challenge that closed on September 4, 2008, but we had so much fun with it that we've reopened it as a theme.

Book Report

We know when you're perusing your friend's book collection or leafing through magazines at the doctor's office you flip straight to the photo sections. And we know you have favorite visually-compelling books in your own libraries. So we want you to hit up your bookshelves and find a book that pleases your photography-loving mind that you think the JPG community should know about! We'd like you to set up a tripod and photograph yourself with a book, likely one that's photography-related, that would be of interest to the JPG community. Then post and add a review--what makes it special? We'll be selecting reviews/images for the next issue! **Note, to submit to this theme, the photo must have a description with your review of the book, and you must also be visible in the frame of the photograph.**

Items We Carry

Photograph the items you carry with you every day - the essentials without which you'd be helpless. So, that means JUST the items in your pockets or purses (no bags otherwise!) shot from above, as specified by Naz Hamid, creator of the Flickr group The Items We Carry. We'll be including this recurring theme in future issues of JPG Magazine. The Items We Carry v2 by Naz Hamid This theme is a continuation of a great photo challenge that ran the week of July 30, 2008. Judged by Naz himself, we saw some amazing photos of JPGers' pockets and purses. Visit the Items We Carry downloads page to see the selections from the photo challenge.

Paradise

Paradise, while centered on one idea, means so many things. It is always bliss, nirvana, perfection. But its realization is different for everyone. Show us your version of euphoria. An ideal day, a secret getaway, a moment with loved ones, a favorite pastime.

Inspired by a JPG Member

We've noticed a lot of folks shooting images in tribute to another image that they have seen on the site. Have you been inspired by a fellow JPGer's image and shot something similar? Maybe you want to shoot a tribute to one of your friends, or even a complete stranger, because he impressed you so much that you want to give him recognition. Don't forget to add a link to the image that you were inspired by, either in the description or by using the "Add A Link" button in the comments field.

JPG Events and Meet-Ups

Share your photos of meet-ups, events, gallery shows, and other photography-related events that involve JPG members. We'll run this theme in every issue, so don't forget to include a good description if you'd like to be featured! Please note that this theme isn't for recent photos you've taken, but instead just for those great shots that show photo events and occasions! If it's not clear from the photo, please include a description of the event to make sure we don't remove your photo by mistake.

Prank

Happy April! Seen some great gags? Whether you were the fool, the fooler, or just a bystander, put your best practical joke photo here.

Recurring Theme: WTF

Every so often you come across something so weird that you just can't describe it in words. We'll be featuring a WTF image in every issue!

Where I'm At

No one knows the place you're from better than you: the nuances, the beauty, the secrets, the people. Give us your photos and stories that tell us about where you live.

Fluid

Flowing, shape changing, liquid and mutable, let's see your interpretation of Fluid.

The Rasterbator

Ever heard of The Rasterbator? It's an awesome online tool where you can upload a photo and it will spit back a half-toned PDF version that you can print on many sheets of paper and hang on your wall to make one huge image. We ran an interview with The Rasterbator's creator, Matias Arje, in Issue 7, so we made this challenge: send one of your photos to the The Rasterbator and make a cool, multi-page, PDF. Then print it out and hang it up somewhere. Finally, take a new photo of the result and add it to this theme! The only rules are: You had to take the original photo (used for the Rasterbation) and you had to take the photo you uploaded to JPG. And, as always, be creative! Try shooting the original photo and the Rasterbated version together. Or shoot yourself with it to show perspective. Have fun!

Zoom

Crank up the stereo, go as fast as possible, and let the shutter fly! Post your favorite photos that show motion. Just don't get a speeding ticket.

Creepy

The world can be a scary place. Has one of your photos ever sent chills down your spine?

Recurring Theme: Nice to Meet You

Go meet someone you don't know and ask to take their photo. Be prepared: Have a shot in mind. Their first question will probably be "why?" Be sure to have a good answer. Ask them to tell you a little bit about themselves. Tape record their answer or write it down. To complete this challenge, post the photo, the person's first name, and a sentence or two quote from them about who they are. Remember, this person should be a stranger to you! Use this challenge as an excuse to introduce yourself to that nice guy or girl at the local coffee shop.

JPG Sightings

Got a copy of JPG Magazine in your hot little hands? Let's see it! Go someplace scenic and take a photo with the magazine in it somewhere and add it here. Note: Photos in this theme must contain a JPG Magazine!