Most of the time, we want a level of exposure in our photos that preserves color and detail. But who says that photography needs to be about color and detail? Which brings us to this week's Shooting Challenge...

The Challenge

Allow too much light through your lens for too long to take artistic advantage of clipping, the phenomenon of blown-out highlights that look like nothing but white. While almost any RAW photo can be tweaked to overexposed levels, as usual, we'd like you to create your image in-camera as much as possible. But if you'd like to preserve some of the photo's contrast, then we won't consider this Photoshop tutorial to be complete cheating.

The Method

I actually haven't come across an excellent tutorial on this one (drop any links in the comments if you have), though obviously, longer shutter speeds and open apertures will capture more light. And the more light, the more clipping. Most any automatic mode just will not do.

The Rules

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the "challenge" part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.
5. Include 800px wide image AND 2560x1600 sized in email. (The 800px image is the one judged, so feel free to crop/alter the image for wallpaper-sized dimensions.)

Send your best entries by Sunday, February 21st at 6PM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with "Blow Out" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg (800px) and FirstnameLastnameWALLPAPER.jpg (2560px) naming conventions. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email.

[Lead photo by ljmacphee on flickr via digitalphotographyschool]