“Underpass” by and © Stephen Worden (billyburg)  See more from Stephen HERE

Welcome to our 7th monthly challenge folks!  My how the time has flown by.  If you’re new to our challenges, the winner from our previous month, in this case Stephen Worden (billyburg on flickr) gets to choose the theme for the following month.  This month’s theme is “Frames”.

There are no rules, and the theme is open to interpretation.  The only real caveat is that Heather and Mat from Mirrorlessons along with myself, get to choose our three favorite images from all of the submissions.  We then post those three to both sites and open it up for a vote.  Everyone then gets to choose which image and photographer wins and goes on to choose the next month’s theme.

The exciting part is that we have compiled our first 6 monthly winners and will be posting another vote soon.  The 6 previous monthly winning images will be voted on by any and everyone to determine our readers favorite overall image from the last 6 monthly challenges with the winner receiving a free Topaz Plugin of their choice (DeNoise, Clarity, ReMask, Adjust, any of them!!!) and a custom, hand built Garda Wriststrap from yours truly.  Who knows what we’ll be able to giveaway next time, but I already have some emails out there and some irons in the fire…

We will be working to do a giveaway after each 6 months worth of challenges, so the next cycle begins today!

To submit, just share your chosen image to both the TRP Flickr Group Thread HERE and the Mirrorlessons Flickr Group Thread HERE and stay tuned.

Each monthly challenge runs through the end of the current month, and the vote starts on the first day of the next month, running for 5 days, then the cycle resets and we start anew!  This has been a great way for us to both challenge each other, but also get to know one another.  I’ve really enjoyed doing this with Heather and Mat and feel that working with such friendly, talented and courteous people such as Heather, Mat and the many cool folks who have submitted over the last 6 months makes the time spent maintaining and creating content for this site worth while.  It’s one thing to gain readers, clicks, etc, but I didn’t start this site to be a job.  I started it because I love photography and talking about photography, so thank you to all who are reading this, and I challenge you to get more involved in our continually growing community here, on Mirrorlessons and Flickr!

Go forth and rock it.

Happy shooting,

T