• A very cool article over at Neatorama.com on the stories behind famous Hollywood studio logos. Check it out here.

•This week’s episode of Photoshop User TV is the “Gear Guide Live” episode and you should definitely check it out if you like shiny new toys. Get it on iTunes or check it out here.

• Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of Flickr, talks about how it all began and how far it’s come in a video interview here.

Happy Monday everyone. Welcome back after the long weekend. I hope you all had a good time and are coming back to work today with all your digits intact.

(Copyright Kareem Black)

• First up today is photographer Kareem Black. Kareem is a photographer who shoots for a diverse array of clients including Flaunt, Fader, Sony Music, GQ, Vibe and many others. I’m loving his old school campaign for Sugar Free Kool-Aid, a photo of which is shown above. In addition to that, his self-promotion campaign is pretty brilliant. He plastered posters around New York that read “Kareem Black to Marry Lindsay Lohan” as a way to drive traffic to his website. I love ideas like this. Go visit his site and check out more of his great work.

• Last Friday, while everyone had already checked out for the weekend, Scott Kelby posted an interview he did with Intellectual Property Attorney Ed Greenburg. Ed talked about many of the most common myths and misconceptions about copyright, shooting in public, model releases, and more. This is great stuff for anybody involved in a creative profession and should be at the top of your viewing list. The interview will also be included in this weeks episode of Photoshop User TV, so check it out there if you’d like. Here’s the link to Scott’s post.

That’s it today. Check back tomorrow for more!

It sounded like a good title to me and certainly appropriate after what happened to me yesterday. So, I get up in the morning and go to read my daily feeds and as I’m casually scrolling through I get to the Layers Magazine Blog. I get to the bottom of the post and what do I see?

Contest Winner
Congratulations to Dustin Schmidt for winning our contest and getting a copy of The onOne Software Plug-In Suite 3!

I nearly fell out of my chair! Like so many other people who often enter contests, I never thought people actually won these things. So in honor of my fantastic win yesterday (please hold your applause till the end of the post), today is contest day!

• First off, a HUGE thank you to R.C. over at Layers Magazine and the Layers team and anyone else responsible for my good fortune. I’d just like to say it was an honor just to be nominated. There were a lot of great entrants for this contest. Who knows why the academy went with me. I mean, I knew I had a strong email, but so did a lot of contestants. Today… I consider myself… the luckiest.. Sorry about that. I got carried away. But seriously I’m very excited and grateful.

Now, as far as contests go, make sure you check out the Layers Magazine blog. Maybe I’m biased since they just made me a winner, (okay, I am biased), but the truth is that I visit their blog daily and it’s always packed with great content, news, and cool sites to check out. And they often have contests! All you have to do is answer a question and send them an email. In fact, sometimes they don’t even have a question! They just want to hear from you, the reader, and get some feedback. And for that, they give you free stuff. Crazy. Check out the blog here.

• Photoshop User TV. They don’t sometimes have contests, or often have contests. They ALWAYS have contests. That means every week they give something away for free. Although you do have to answer a trivia question. And sometimes the questions are hard. But they’re always Photoshop related and in the process of looking for the answer you’re only going to become better and more knowledgeable about Photoshop. So it’s a win/win either way! Here’s the link to the official site. (update - In order to answer the trivia question you have to watch the show. You go to the site to send in your answer. Just to clarify.)

• The Digital Photography Show. Another podcast I listen to regularly. Hosted by Scott Sherman and Michael Stein, this really cool show is about, what else, digital photography. They have great interviews, news, tips, and gear reviews and also often give things away for little more than a simple answer to some piece of trivia. Check ‘em out here.

These just happen to be some of the blogs I read that often have contests and give away free stuff. Of course, that’s not why I read them, but it sure doesn’t hurt. There are lots more out there so get searching and become a winner like me!