Now this...this was cool. Iron Photographer 14 is a smashing success. Y'all made some amazing photographs. From the hauntingly beautiful green espresso cup by Ahmad to Brett's weirdly compelling vase, the creativity is staggering. You guys have taken a limited number of elements and turned them into art. That's really pretty amazing.

You'll be relieved to know Iron Photographer 15 is going to be more straightforward. It won't require require any major weirdness on your part; just creative thought. Here are your new elements:

1 - a brush
2 - something crumpled
3 - creatively overexposed

The brush can be any sort of brush. Toothbrush, hair brush, shoe brush, it doesn't matter. It simple needs to be readily apparent that it's a brush. We realize that something crumpled is pretty vague. We simply mean a thing that is crushed, creased, collapsed in on itself. A tin can, a sheet of paper, a milk carton, a cardboard box. It doesn't matter if you crumple it yourself or if you find it crumpled.

Here comes the more difficult element: creatively overexposed. What the hell does that mean? It means you have to disregard the traditional rules of exposure. If your camera suggests you shoot the photo at f5.6 and 1/60th of a second, you tell your camera to get stuffed. Expose it longer, or use a larger aperture...you choose. Or you can choose to overexpose the image in post processing. It's entirely up to you.

Here is the standard Iron Photographer reminder: all IP photographs must be new images, not images pulled from your archives. The purpose of IP is to challenge you to create new art.

If you have questions, ask them here. If you have complaints, email them to comments@whitehouse.gov.

Iron Photographer 15 will be published in two weeks from today, on Tuesday, February 13, 2007. And here it is: Iron Photographer #15 on utata.org.

Tag the photos utataip15.

Utata is now supporting the wonderfully geeky new machine tags, so you may include these options: utata:color=black (which will provide a black frame around the image) and utata:description=hide (which, obviously, hides the description on the image). Note that these are different from the old tags (which are still functional, so don't fret about that). In addition, UberGeek David has defined two new machine tags for Utata that allows you to include part of a description. It's incredibly cool and convenient...and I'll explain it further in a separate thread.

So, here we are, ready to step into Iron Photographer 15. So get out there and overexpose yourselves.

(And double especial thanks to Brenda for doing all the work of publishing the project. Actually, double especial thanks to Brenda for ALL the work she does.)