I dub thee “Southeast Michigan Photographers”

The results are in and we have changed the name of the group to Southeast Michigan Photographers due to a 34 to 1 in favor of the name change vote. With the name change we found it appropriate to update our blog’s layout to a bigger and friendlier format. We hope you enjoy the changes we have made recently, these changes include:

• Official name change
• Launch of the official forums
• Relocation of the monthly assignment to the forums

Thank you for your patience during these changes, major changes such as these never go as smoothly as first imagined. We have much more in store for you over the coming months, that I think you’ll enjoy.

Mission Complete!

Our Facebook group page has reached a major milestone yesterday. Back around July of this year we set a goal of reaching 200+ members in 2012 on our Facebook group page, mission complete! Ayana Miller is the 200th member of the Facebook group page. If you are not a member of the Facebook group page yet, make sure to head on over and join by clicking here. Also be sure to add all of your local photographer friends. I wonder if we can double our membership in 2013. That would be quite an accomplishment.

October Winner: Kenji Gunderson

Congratulations to group member Kenji Gunderson on winning October's monthly assignment. Kenji's photos are always inspiring and creative. We will be moving the monthly assignments to our forums going forward. This will allow non-Flickr group members to participate. Existing Flickr members will find that nothing has really changed with how to participate in the assignments with the exception of a couple extra clicks of the ol' mouse. Information and the new assignments can be found here. Here is Kenji's winning photo.

Facebook to Forums Photo Sharing

I've created a short video tutorial on sharing your photos you have on Facebook on our forums. The ability to share photo directly from Facebook is nice, especially if you don't have a photo host such as Flickr or Photobucket. It's actually very simple to do, watch the video and get your Facebook photos shared. Watch the video in full screen mode.

New Southeast Michigan Photographer Forums

With our large South East Michigan Digital & Film Photography community on Flickr and the exploding population and volume of content coming through on our Facebook page, we realized that our group needed a better way to archive and fluidly discuss all our valuable experience and photographic knowledge that comes through on both of our group pages.... So we decided to open up a South Eastern Michigan Digital & Film Photography Forum.

Facebook and Flickr are great tools and avenues to gather in, share and discuss photography related subjects but both are lacking when it comes to organizing and archiving the content. By creating this forum we can keep all the content that would normally get lost in the ever updating pile of Facebook postings, have a better way to find material that would normally be placed in the "user unfriendly" and "page after page" list of unorganized discussions on Flickr, and be able to put it all together in a nice organized and easy to find fashion in a forum layout. For the record, we have absolutely no intent or desire to abandon either our Flickr or Facebook pages. Each avenue holds a unique and distinctive quality that each of the other avenues does not. This is just another avenue with a different set of unique characteristics that we can all use as a valuable resource.

The forum was officially opened Tuesday October 16th. Although still in it's infant stages, within short time we expect to have a totally organized and a material-full forum that includes a member introduction forum, a beginner forum, separate digital and film forums, presentation and editing forums, equipment forums, business related forums, multi subject photo posting forums for general display and/or critique, photo challenge and monthly assignment forums, location archives for good places to photograph landscape and nature, a local south eastern Michigan photography related news forum, a classifieds forum for buy/sell and a fun "off topic" lounge type forum where members can hang out, take part in forum games, and discuss anything non photography related like sports, hobbies, their pets or just whatever one feels like.

To make this forum a success, we need you to stop in and start to fill it up with material. Over the next few months as more material comes in, we will be expanding the topic forums and be organizing them accordingly. We hope you stop by and feel it out. We already have a good friendly group of folks there now so stop in, check it out, sign up, make yourself at home and share a photo, share an experience, an idea and share our new forum. You can find it right here at..........

http://semidfp.boards.net/index.cgi

Hope to see all you south east Michigan photographers there!!

..and gosh darnit, people like us!

Help spread the word to your Facebook friends and fans by "liking" our website. The Facebook Like button is located to the right, just above the blog archive menu and below the monthly assignment portal.

Monthly Assignment Info Portal

I'm pleased to announce that the Monthly Assignment Winners Gallery is up and running. If you've been a member for a while, you might remember the old gallery hosted by Flickr. That gallery had certain unfreidnly limitations and grew obsolete. We are introducing the new winners gallery and assignment portal to the top right of this page. Winning an assignment earns your photo a spot on our main page while the next assignment's shooting phase is in progress. Each time someone clicks on your photo, they will be taken to it in your Flickr photostream in all of its high res goodness. After being replaced by a new winning photo you will find your photo among previous winners in the Monthly Assignment Winners Gallery. Photos that state that the preview is unavailable have had their privacy settings set too strict. If you currently have a photo in the gallery with the mentioned error, you can change your settings so we can post the preview.

semidfp.blogspot.com

Welcome to the South East Michigan Digital & Film Photography blog. You’ll find updates about assignments and events here, as well as random photography related writings by our group moderators and members. If you’ve been a member for a while you’ll know that the group is divided among two different platforms, Flickr and Facebook. The nice thing about having this blog is you can point your friends or photographers you meet on the street to this simple web address, semidfp.blogspot.com, and they’ll have direct links to both platforms. Another advantage is that it’s a common place where Flickr only or Facebook only members can see news about the other platform (yes some members refuse to use Facebook or Flickr… I know right?).

The top right of the blog’s homepage will host the current monthly assignment’s winning photo and links to both a gallery of previous winning photos (under construction at the time of writing this) and the next assignment. 

Here is a small list of idea’s that have been presented that may materialize over the next few months:

      • Group .com web address (would replace the blogspot address)

      • Branching out to include videography

      • Resurrecting the monthly featured photographer blog

      • Partnership with a local photography store (discounts!)

Make sure you point your non-member photographer friends to this blog, semidfp.blogspot.com, so they can easily join both platforms and get a little taste of what our group has to offer!