My colleague Eric Bauer, Boston.com's Information Architect who helps out with Globe Critiques here on RAW, bought his son a cell phone the other day that has a 5 megapixel camera. (My first DSLR, a Nikon D100, had 6 megapixels.) The quality of cell phone cameras has improved so much that I decided to run a Photo Challenge of cell phone photos.

How far will you go to take a great photo? If any of you got up really early this morning to capture the Leonid meteor shower, or are planning to shoot it late tonight or early tomorrow morning, please post your photos in this gallery. (We ran a meteor shower photo by RAW Dawg Evan Sabogal on the Boston.com homepage today ... Evan took the shot at about 4 a.m. Tuesday in Amherst.)

Tom Henry only recently converted from film to digital photography, and says he has rediscovered his art through Photoshop and digital technology. But, he wonders, is his art any good?

We asked Globe photographer David L. Ryan to take a look at Tom's portfolio and give him -- and us -- an opinion.

Lots of you must have read right past the rule for the November contest that your photo must be taken this month. Of the 40+ photos entered so far, 14 are ineligible because they were taken earlier than Nov. 1. You have a little more than 2 weeks left to get a shot this month ... and please remove the contest tags from the old photos! Thanks ...

Lee Cullivan of Belmont, aka shoothead, is one of four RAW regulars who have won prizes in two monthly contests; the others are Garry Schlatter of Brisbane, Australia (Garry), Gillian Henry of Revere (amythyst_lake), and Kati Seiffer of Burlington (kseiffer). But Lee is the first one to capture two First Places -- in last November's Motion contest and this September's Jobs competition. I knew I had to make him a Photographer of the Week.

When I chose a color as the theme for October, I was looking for a bit of a break from tradition, opting for something a bit more abstract than many of the themes we usually tackle. And when I asked professional photographer D. Sharon Pruitt of Utah to be our judge, I had unconventionality in mind as well.

So I was cruising around the Web, looking for Pink photos and just reading on the topic of using color as a contest theme, when I came across an interesting site called Pink Sherbet Photography belonging to a Utah photographer.

Mark Laverty of Plymouth was a photographer for his high school newspaper, but put his camera aside for about 30 years before the digital revolution rekindled his interest.

Folks, the October 'Pink' contest has some of the best photos we've ever received. We've built five galleries to show them off. Later, I'll introduce our judge ... she's pretty interesting!
Gallery 1 | Gallery 2 | Gallery 3 | Gallery 4 | Gallery 5

This month, we have a bonus critique from Globe staff photographer Barry Chin. As he looked over the portfolios of amateurs who had submitted photos for a Globe review, he came across photos submitted by RAW regular Erin Hart of Boston, and said, "Hmmm. She doesn't need much help."

Back when we were voting on contest themes (I temporarily discontinued that because I had enough theme ideas from you to last a year or two!), many of you voted in favor of Silhouettes as a theme -- and I think that's a great idea.