Our latest giveaway for a Tamron AF18-270mm is now over, and it was by far our most popular giveaway ever. We received 909 entries via comments and 543 entries via Twitter, for a grand total of 1452 entries.

And without further ado, the randomly selected winner of the lens is…

#460: Lydia King (@lydking)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lydking/4084984279/ one of the first pictures I’ve ever taken.

Here’s the photograph:

Congratulations Lydia! Please email editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this giveaway. It was very interesting seeing all of the favorite photographs that were linked to as entries.

We have more giveaways lined up, so please stay tuned!

Update: This giveaway is now over. The three winners were randomly selected and announced below. Thanks for participating!

When Udi Tirosh over at DIYPhotography launched the Bokeh Masters Kit a few weeks ago, we said we’d be giving away a couple kits here on PetaPixel in early January 2010. Well, here it is! We’re giving away three (3) Masters Edition Bokeh Masters Kits that each normally cost $35. Over 500 of these bokeh-customizing kits have been sold since they were introduced.

To enter, all you have to do is answer the following question:

What is your favorite book?

There’s two ways to enter this contest, and you can use both methods to double your chances:

1. Leave your response as a comment (on this PetaPixel.com post)
2. Tweet your answer, and include the following link to this post anywhere in the tweet: http://j.mp/ppxlbmk

   As long as the link is found somewhere in your tweet, you will be entered in this giveaway.

We will randomly select the three winners in two days on 1/13/10, and announce the winners in this post. Good luck!

Thanks to Udi for donating the kits for this giveaway!

Winners

This giveaway is now over. We received 159 entries via comments and 108 entries via Twitter, for a total of 267 entries. Here are three winners we randomly selected:

#194: suprspi (@suprspi)

My favourite book atm is “The Way of Shadows” by Brent Weeks – it changes constantly though.

#67: Nianya (@MagicalMischief)

Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.

#145: Saurabh (@sloth13)

Sarah Moon: Coincidences by Sarah Moon

Congratulations! Please email editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize.

Thanks everyone for participating in the contest and sharing your favorite books! We’ll have another contest soon, so stay tuned!

Merry Christmas! It has been a week already since we posted our latest giveaway for a Lensbaby Composer, and this one has been our most popular giveaway so far. We received a total of 584 comment entries and 427 entries through Twitter, for a whopping total of 1011 entries.

Without further ado, the randomly selected winner of a Lensbaby Composer and Creative Aperture Set is…

#581: Henning Wüst

The top item on his Christmas wishlist was:

simple wish: peace on earth

Congratulations! Please send an email to editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize (We emailed you as well).

A big thank you to everyone who participated. We hope you’re all having a fun and safe holiday season!

Image credit: white christmas by brianjmatis

Thanks to everyone who participated in our giveaway on black friday. In response to the question “what are you most thankful for?”, we received 80 comments and 33 tweets for 113 entries total.

Here are the randomly selected winners:

The winner of a Trade Secret Card Pack:

#108: headedforhades (@headedforhades)

I’m thankful for Petapixel’s tweets! ;o)

The three winners of Digital Photography School‘s new book The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography:

#2: Corey Russell (@MeatJacket)

I’m pretty thankful for living in one of the nicest parts of Canada , wouldn’t wanna be anywhere else.

#107: thedudeabides67 (@thedudeabides67)

I am thankful for the rich colours of life.

#109: matiassingers (@matiassingers):

I am thankful for @punkpolkadots, @ashwinpande and all other friends who make the next day worth looking forward to

Congratulations! Please contact editor@petapixel.com to claim your prizes.

Thanks again to everyone who participated. We have some pretty massive giveaways lined up, so keep your eyes peeled!

Image credit: Giraffe kindergarten by Focx.

This past week we had a giveaway in which we asked for your favorite photography related websites. The four prizes are memberships of various levels to SmugMug. We received 94 responses through comments on the post and 72 responses through Twitter for a total of 166 entries.

If you’re looking for new photography websites to visit or blogs to follow, you’ll find a lot of good ones in the comments we received.

Here are the four winners, picked randomly using random.org:

Standard Membership Winners ($40)

#4: Yael Talleyrand (@yatalley)

http://photocritic.org/ s more lika a blog … but since i find his stuff veeery cool :)… i guess thats it.

#53: Gil_margey

I like http://beruphoto.com — they pick photos from livejournal

Power Membership Winner ($60)

#32: sneuweger

That is difficult there are so many great sites in my feedreader… so i will choose Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider: http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/ not only for his original posts but also for the numerous links to interesting people of “the industry”…

Pro Membership Winner ($150)

#7: Frances Parker (@simplybetrue)

my fave photography-related website? j*’s blog. i heart Jasmine Star http://www.jasminestarblog.com and read her blog everyday.

Congratulations! Please email me at editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize.

Thanks for participating everyone!

Update: This giveaway has ended. Winners were randomly selected and announced here. Thanks for participating!

Things were kind of hectic this week. My bike and laptop decided to both die on the same day, and two days later I became a Mac user for the first time by purchasing a 13-inch Macbook Pro. Might still switch back to Windows next time, but I didn’t want to upgrade to Vista.

Anyhoo, how about another giveaway?

This week I’m giving away four annual subscriptions to the popular photo sharing service SmugMug. The four prizes are:

• 2 standard memberships worth $40 each
• 1 power membership worth $60
• 1 pro membership worth $150

There will be four different randomly selected winners this week. All you have to do to enter this week’s giveaway is to answer the following question:

What is your favorite photography related website?

This could be a photo service, a blog, a forum, or whatever else, as long as it’s related somehow to your passion for photography.

There are two ways to share your answer and enter the contest, and you can use both methods to double your chances:

1. Leave your response as a comment on this PetaPixel.com post
2. Tweet your response, and include the following link to this post anywhere in the tweet: http://j.mp/ppsmgmg

   As long as the link appears in a tweet, you will be entered in this giveaway. You don’t even need to include @petapixel.

The deadline for this giveaway is Saturday, September 19th, 2009. The winners will be randomly selected using random.org.

Good luck!

Update: Forgot to mention this in the original post: existing SmugMug members can still participate in this contest. if you win, the membership will be added to your existing membership.

Our Lensbaby giveaway has come to an end. In the past week, we received 566 entries (a new record), with 310 comments and 256 tweets. Our previous record was 510 entries a couple weeks ago when we gave away a Streetwalker backpack by Think Tank Photo.

I think our question, “What is your favorite childhood memory?”, is the most interesting one we’ve asked so far, and many of you wrote quite a bit in response to it.

More about favorite childhood memories in a bit, but first let’s announce the winner of the Lensbaby Composer. The randomly selected winner is…

#41: Maria

Climbing in parents’ bed and making clock-faces on Dad’s bare back… with my baby teeth! Yeah, he would half-laugh half-scream but still let me make multiple ones… I think/hope I tickled him more than I hurt him. Thanks, Dad, for enduring with love, you always warm my heart. <3

Congratulations! Please email me at editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize.

Thanks to everyone who entered and shared their favorite childhood memory with all of us! We’ll be giving away something again very soon, so stay tuned!

Here are some childhood memories we received this past week:

elainepeters:

When I little my father was severely ill in the hospital for more than three months over the Christmas holiday. We were told Christmas would be very simple that year one gift for each of us. Then on Christmas Eve total strangers showed up and brought us gifts and food. With no income because my father was in the hospital, I remember my mother in tears of joy and gratitude over their kindness. We never knew who they were or how they knew, but it made Christmas very special that year. Also my mom let us keep up our artificial tree until he came home in March. We wanted him to enjoy Christmas at home , too.

syedahmed:

My favorite memory is watching my dad taking family pictures with his Roliflex camera that was in a brown leather casing. Now I am fourty years old, a father of three sons, and my dad has passed away. I own his Roliflex camera and look at it in amazement everytime I take it out. It brings back fond memories of my childhood and who would have known that after almost four decades I would be into photography just like him. If only one day, my boys can follow my footsteps and enjoy photography as much as I have begun to.

Jennifer Squires Ross (website):

My favourite childhood memory was not having tv because I grew up in such a small town, so small that we didn’t even qualify as a village. There weren’t cable lines running out there (and there still aren’t) and aerial antennas didn’t do much because we were in a valley. We had to make our own fun which included building our own Ewok village and counting and installing our own population sign (262 people in case you were wondering). This small town called Hockley Village is what inspired me to become a photographer.

boris (@borborigm):

Being able to play for hours with a piece of wood

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner has been randomly selected and announced here. Thanks for entering everyone!

If you follow us on twitter (@petapixel), you might have heard already, but we just passed 10,000 followers. Huzzah!

This blog is about four months old, so I’m definitely surprised at how far it has come in just one summer. Thank you all for reading and following us on Twitter.

To celebrate this big milestone, I’m going to be giving away a Lensbaby Composer lens and a Creative Aperture Kit. This combined package is worth $280. I probably don’t need to tell you much more about this lens. It’s Lensbaby.

To enter this giveaway, simply answer the following question:

What is your favorite childhood memory?

As usual, there’s two ways to enter, and you can use both ways to double your chances.

1. Leave your response as a comment on this PetaPixel.com post
2. Tweet your response, and include the following link to this post anywhere in the tweet: http://bit.ly/pplbby

   If the link appears in your tweet, then our little giveaway elf will automatically find it and count it as an entry. If you don’t include the link, then our elf won’t be able to find it and it won’t be counted.

The deadline for getting your answer to us is the evening of Saturday, September 5th, 2009. We’ll be randomly selecting an entry using random.org.

Good luck!

Update: Some of you have been asking whether people outside the United States can enter. The answer is yes. The lens can be shipped internationally. Good luck!

Disclosure: Lensbaby is currently a sponsor of PetaPixel.

Update: This giveaway is now over. The winners were randomly selected and announced here. Thanks to everyone who participated!

One of the tools I occasionally bust out during post-processing is Noise Ninja, a noise-reduction program/plugin used by seven of the ten largest newspapers in the United States.

Take this photograph I took yesterday as an example:

Though I was shooting outdoors with plenty of light, I had accidentally left my ISO set at 1600. This caused the photograph to end up looking dirty and full of noise. In addition, I underexposed the photo, giving it even more noise after correcting the exposure during post-processing.

You can hover over the above image to see the image after using Noise Ninja on it.

Don’t see much of a difference? Maybe a crop of a smaller area of the frame will help you see what Noise Ninja does (hover over this before image to see the after image):

Neat, huh? The amount of noise in the photo was significantly reduced, even before tweaking and selectively editing the image. For some more before-and-after examples, visit the gallery on the PictureCode website.

I’m giving away three (3) Noise Ninja Pro Bundle licenses, each worth $79.95. These bundles include the Photoshop plugin, the Aperture plugin, and the standalone program. All you need to do to enter this giveaway is answer the following question:

If you could turn into any animal, which animal would you choose?

There’s two ways you can tell us your answer, and feel free to use both ways:

1. Leave a comment on this post (at PetaPixel.com)
2. Tweet your answer, and include this link somewhere in the tweet:

   http://bit.ly/ptpxnn

   The tweet doesn’t even need to be @petapixel. As long as the link is somewhere in the tweet, our friendly little giveaway bot will find it.

This giveaway will end next Tuesday morning, on August 25th, 2009. We’ll be picking the winner randomly using random.org. As usual, in addition to the winner we’ll post some of the more creative or interesting responses we receive.

Good luck!

PictureCode is not (currently) a sponsor of PetaPixel. They were simply nice enough to provide us with these licenses for us to give away to you, our awesome readers.

Update: Just learned that I had accidentally posted the deadline as September 1st, or a week later than I intended. Fixed it to read August 25th. Thanks for catching this @scottnopants!

Wow… I’m pretty surprised at how popular this past week’s Streetwalker giveaway was. Over this past week we received 510 entries, with 230 comments and 280 tweets. To put that into perspective, the most responses for a giveaway prior to this one was 191 (when we gave away two Photomatix licenses).

To pick a winner, I assign each entry with a number, and use random.org to randomly select one entry. Using this method, we found the winner of a Streetwalker backpack to be:

#144: Kerry (birchblazephotography.com)

I think it would be amazing to photograph the Country of Bhutan, it’s supposed to be one of the happiest in the world, and it’s very beautiful as well!

Congratulations Kerry! I hope you enjoy your new camera backpack.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this week’s giveaway. Be sure to check back again soon, as we have some pretty awesome stuff lined up to be given away…

I also really enjoyed reading all of your responses. Here are some of them:

dahak_z:

Well, not so down to Earth speaking, in the broader sense of the word ‘world’, I’d really go and photograph the Universe, if one could only explore it. Think of all the nebulas, alien planets, and other unseen phenomena. Could result in quite some awesome photos.

On a more down to Earth tone, i’d make a one year (or more years, however long it takes), of all the world’s national parks. That could also result in quite some awesome photographs.

Cheers

Martin (time2shoot.com):

It might sound strange for some, but I wish I could capture the life of the people of North Korea and show the world how life is over there.

4strinbass (@4strinbass):

My dream place to photograph would be the ocean floor of the Atlantic Ocean, want to get nite style shots of glowing fish

simonhucko (@simonhucko):

how about anywhere over the earth? i’d love to go up to the ISS with a camera