With Valentine's Day approaching, we thought it would be fun to practice shooting sweets: candy wrapped in shiny, colored paper; chocolate (solid or melted); hard candy, soft candy ....

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What are you grateful for?

Show us what you appreciate, or show others giving thanks. Please, no quick snapshots; compose your images artfully, watching out for distractions in the background.

Let's keep it to 3 photos per photographer. Remember, this isn't a contest; it's a non-competitive challenge.

Upload your photos here and see the images others have submitted.

And Happy Thanksgiving!

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Let's do a quick, 4-day Challenge: Political campaigning. Candidates and sign holders will be out in force from now through Tuesday; see if you can grab some interesting, creative shots that capture the frantic final days. No blatant electioneering!

Upload your photos here.

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So many foliage shots you see are distance shots of mountainsides, lakes framed by color, woods. What could be even more interesting are detailed images of individual leaves as they undergo their transformation.

So that's the watchword for this challenge: Get close. No landscapes.

The deadline is a month from today, when we'll post a new challenge. (Remember, this is a challenge, not a contest, so there will be no judging and no prizes.)

Size your photos down to 1024 px wide for horizontals and 500 px deep for verticals, and adjust the dpi to 96. Massive files slow the gallery display.

Upload your photos with a title and caption here.

Send questions to raw@boston.com.

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I try to take different routes to work to break up the monotony of the drive (not that I have a whole lot of choices unless I want to extend my commute to more than an hour). I'm also reading a book called The Artist's Way that's essentially a 12-week course on how to drag the creativity that's inside all of us out into the open. (Anybody else ever read it?)

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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.

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And I don't mean that just the foliage was spectacular ... your camera work was as well. This was our latest Photo Challenge (not to be confused with our monthly contests ... there's no judging involved with the Challenges). I'll announce another Challenge next week. Look over the self-uploading gallery to see your handiwork and that of others; just click on the first thumbnail photo to launch the slideshow. > Foliage gallery

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By all accounts, this is going to be an autumn of spectacular foliage in New England. As the Globe's Beth Daley reported late last month, the wet summer we had earlier and the crisp, clear weather we're having now are the perfect recipe for fantastic and widespread color.

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Did you know that more babies are born per day in September in the US than in any other month?

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