Update: This giveaway is now over. The winner was randomly selected and announced below.

It’s been way too long since we’ve done a giveaway — three months, in fact — so today we have an awesome one: one lucky (and randomly selected) reader will receive a large 30×40-inch SmugMug MetalPrint of their favorite photo worth $301.50 and a year of SmugMug Pro worth $150 — a combined value of $451.5. This giveaway is open to international readers as well, and it’ll be shipped right to your door for free.

To enter this giveaway, all you need to do is:

Tell us the best photo advice you’ve ever received

There are two ways to enter, and doing both methods will give you 2 entries in the contest, and thus double the chance the win!

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/ppsgmg

   As long as the link appears in the tweet, you’ll be automatically entered in the contest.

This contest will end Friday, August 26th, 2011. We’ll randomly pick a winner using random.org and update this post. Good luck!

Update: This giveaway is now over. We received 444 comment entries and 253 Tweet entries for 697 entries overall. The randomly selected winner is…

#538: Claudia Cooper (@claud26point2)

I learned this advice – BSE (background, separation, edges) in a photography workshop [#]

Congratulations! Please email editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize (we’re contacting you as well).

Thanks to everyone who entered! Please stay tuned for more awesome giveaways!

A big thanks to SmugMug for providing the prizes for this giveaway!

Update: This giveaway is now over, and the winner can be found at the bottom of this post.

This week we’re giving away a 1 year SmugMug Pro membership worth $150 and a professional template installed by FastLine worth $345 — a total value of $495. This is a great way to add subscription time onto your existing account, or to try SmugMug if you’ve been meaning to do so.

To enter this giveaway, all you need to do is:

Tell us the very first camera you owned

There are two ways to enter, and doing both methods will give you 2 entries in the contest, and thus double the chance the win!

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

   As long as the link appears in the tweet, you’ll be automatically entered in the contest.

This contest will end in two days on Thursday, March 3rd, 2011. We’ll randomly pick a winner using random.org and update this post. Good luck!

Update: This giveaway is now over. We received 375 comment entries and 195 Tweet entries for 570 entries total. The randomly selected winner is…

#147: Donovan Rekanize Fannon

Pentax K1000, complete with a 1970s hippie strap. In high school, these were the workhorse student-learning cameras.

Congratulations! Please email editor@petapixel.com to claim your prize (we’re emailing you as well).

Thanks to everyone who participated. We’re going to be having another giveaway soon, so stay tuned!

A big thanks to SmugMug and FastLine for providing the prizes for this giveaway!

Google Trends is an interesting service that can provide glimpses into how popular certain things are at any given time among the general public.

I thought it would be interesting to search for some photography related keywords to see what’s rising and falling in popularity. A lot of the following results probably correspond to what you’ve already observed from looking around at friends, family, and the people around you.

First off, the popularity of DSLR cameras seems to be exploding, at least with the people I know (especially at church). Everyone seems to be getting a DSLR rather than a point-and-shoot these days. Here’s what Google trends tell us about the search volume of the keyword “dslr”:

In this case, Google definitely confirms what I’ve been observing. The search volume of “dslr” this year is about four times as large as four years ago. This is even more significant given the fact that the “camera” keyword seems to be falling rather than rising.

Another keyword with a lot of momentum is “photoblog”:

Seems like the term is getting more popular, and that more and more people are starting photoblogs to share their photographs. Notice how, unlike “dslr”, the graph doesn’t really start until around 2003 or 2004. This seems to be about when the term “photoblog” began to become mainstream.

Something else that the “photoblog” keyword reveals is how popular photoblogging is in Poland. This probably isn’t common knowledge, but I also discovered this independently a while ago while working on Photoblog.com. Photoblogging service photoblog.pl is among the 50 most popular websites in Poland, and photoblog.com also has a significant number of Polish users.

Let’s move on to some more interesting photo related trends…

How about the battle between Canon and Nikon?

Seems like Canon is the clear leader in terms of popularity (sometime we’ve known, right?), but also that Nikon is slowly closing the gap… at least in terms of search volume.

Other manufacturers are a little more difficult to compare since they’re not as focused on photography equipment.

What about photo sharing? Here’s a comparison between some of the more popular services:

Not surprisingly, Flickr is the 800lb gorilla in this space (though it’s losing a little weight). SmugMug is relatively tiny, though this is probably because it’s an exclusively paid service, while a large portion of Flickr’s members use it for free.

Webshots seems to be fading away, while upstart Twitter service Twitpic has burst onto the scene in the past year.

Facebook is obviously the largest photo-sharing service in the world, but including it in the graph makes every other service appear as lines on the x-axis.

Those are some current trends in the world of photography. If you do some searches of your own and find other interesting photo-related trends, please leave a comment sharing what you find with us! Maybe I’ll append your results to the post.

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!