Competitions

Our ‘Tools of the Trade’ challenge was inspired by the editor’s encounter with a well-worn old brace-and-bit, and in particular with how evocative it was of his long dead grandfather.

THIS COMPETITION HAS ENDED.
Camera House and Photo Review photo competition for kids 12 and under.

The habitat challenge asked photographers to go out into the world and photograph people in, as we said at the time, what might be described as their native environment.

At the time we set this Photo Challenge Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria were all experiencing terrible floods. Natural disasters were therefore much in our minds and we thought the power of nature would make a great challenge. To our surprise though, entries were down on their usual numbers. Were people all disastered-out? Was the basic concept just too vague? We’ll never know the answer, but happily we still received some fine work from our creative contributors.

PR17 Photo Challenge: In a Blur

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.

Our Photo Challengers responded in their usual creative fashion to our ‘Picture in picture’ exercise. It has to be said that we really dithered over the winner this time around. In the end, though, we decided to give the guernsey to Elana Bailey’s ‘Reflections on the side window at Lavender Fields Cottage’ for its quiet trompe l’oeil effect. We found our eyes being drawn back to the symmetrical composition and the slightly painterly quality of the reflected images in the window. As a token of appreciation, we’ll be sending Elana a Digital Foci Picture Porter 35 250GB portable storage device (RRP $549).

Funny thing about these photo challenges; no matter what concept we come up with, we never really manage to quite anticipate how our clever contributing photographers will respond. As we said when we posed the shadow challenge, our idea was to encourage the creation of dramatic film noir-style compositions. But, as you can see from the images on these pages creativity will not be so easily corralled.