Mark

Photo Review Challenge 19 was to capture a subject reflected in water or on a wet surface. We complicated matters by adding that we didn’t want to to see the subject itself, just its reflection. That narrowed the field a bit, but happily posed no problems for our talented contributors.

Challenge 18 was to get down low and to shoot upward. Peter Cook, our winner, went lower than any of the entrants in his search for an interesting angle.

Our freeze-frame photo challenge proved very popular indeed. While it’s difficult to choose a winner and runners-up from so many strong entries, we’re pleased to have the ‘problem’. In the end, three striking images from Melissa Grimley caught our collective eye, and we’ve decided to give her balletic ‘white man trying to jump’ the winner’s guernsey. She writes: ‘These photos were taken one sunny late afternoon of my brother and a mate whilst they were “mucking about” at a local park with a skateboard and playing one-on-one basketball. The photos were shot with a Canon EOS 300D with a 17-40mm f4 L lens at shutter speeds between 1/1000th and 1/1600th of a second to freeze them in mid-action.’ has won a Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Executive Edition.

For our Absolutely Pollock challenge we asked photographers to seek out instances of accidental human-created abstract beauty. As usual, our Photo Challengers went out into the world with their cameras and came back with a selection of arresting images.

We asked Photo Challengers to dial in a slow shutter speed and then to ‘pan for success’ in Challenge #41. Since it was such a wide open brief we didn’t have any particular expectations about what we might receive. But, as usual, the creative responses ranged widely across the blurry landscape of slow shutter photography.

The Reflections Photo Challenge attracted an exceptional number of high quality entries. Indeed, we were so impressed by the high standard and large number of submissions that we decided to triple the number of pages we usually allocate to this section. And even then we had to leave a few very good pictures out of the final group. Happily we have room for the extras here on our website.

The inspiration for the Night Lights challenge came about after we decided to publish the lovely night studies of Sydney photographer Peter Solness (Photo Review Australia issue 41). We hoped that our Photo Challengers would be similarly inspired when asked for their take on lights in the night. Happily, as the pictures shown here demonstrate, we were once again rewarded with a variety of creative responses to what is a somewhat technically demanding theme.

Never underestimate the power of black and white. Photo Challenge 36 was all about monochrome and boy did our challengers rise to the occasion. We received a great swag of terrific entries and it was therefore exceptionally difficult to decide a winner. But, in the end, that’s our task, so after much back and forth, we gave the nod to Mark Sherborne for his very subtle untitled landscape study. As a token of our appreciation, Mark will receive a Verbatim 250GB Portable Hard Drive.

For our 38th Photo Challenge we asked participants to seek out photogenic examples of repetition. As usual our endlessly creative correspondents delighted us with their fine and subtle interpretations of the challenge. While there was only a hair’s breadth between them, we decided that this issue’s winner had to be veteran Photo Challenger Roz Krugle’s humorous row of school kids’ feet. It would have been a very good picture if they’d all been wearing shoes, but the single pair of bare feet transformed the picture into a smile-inducing classic.

The idea for the Hands competition came to your editor whilst he was perusing a dog-eared copy of Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. This was the book that, to be frank, taught your humble servant how to draw like a grown up rather than a child. As I flicked through it, a piece of paper slipped from the pages. It was a drawing I’d attempted of my hand …and that lead by the usual aribitrary chain of free association to the notion that hands might make a good subject for a Photo Review challenge.