Competitions

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.

We’re never quite sure what to expect from our endlessly creative Photo Challengers and the Veiled challenge was no exception to the rule. Winner Pamela Smith earned first place for noticing and then capturing the veiling effect of a horse’s mane. This is the kind of outside-of-the-box thinking we really like to see. For her well-executed effort, Photo Review Australia is pleased to send Pamela a JCMatthew 19-inch (48cm) digital photo frame, the DPF-BOM19 HD Pro Series 1280×1024 resolution with secure file technology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My, what a shy bunch our usual crowd of keen Photo Challengers are! Even though the conditions were as easy as they could possibly be – ie, to look into your own lens – it seems that we modern photographers are rather wary of being our own subjects. Still, although we received a comparative handful of entries for Photo Challenge 35, the standard was, as usual, pleasingly high.

We were happily overwhelmed with the outburst of photographic creativity inspired by the ‘It takes two’ Photo Challenge. To the average person, ‘Diptych’ may just be a moderately useful Scrabble word, but for our photographers it was the impetus they needed to come up with an extraordinary variety of artistic juxtapositions. There is something special about the way two well-chosen pictures can exemplify the old cliche about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. These pairings are each, in their own way, arresting. They make you want to linger for a time as you decode their respective stories.