Competitions

Photo Challenge 23 was another in our series of challenges that ask you to look anew at some part of daily life. The only travel it required was a trip to the dinner table.

The challenge we set in our August-Sept 2005 issue, was not easy. The task we set was to capture the experience of that most humdrum and ordinary of experiences – a trip to the supermarket. Our intention was to set Photo Challengers a task that really made them work to find an interesting image. In the end it was a bit of an old home week as some familiar Challenge responders got across the line for the win and places. We think they answered the call rather successfully.

The challenge we set in our June-July 2005 issue was easy: take an interesting picture within 15 minutes of waking up. It’s tough to be creative so early in the day, but our Photo Challengers were up to the mark in their usual style.

Our challenge for this issue was to seek out something old, yet small enough to be carried by a person. We wanted to see what interesting textures and colours talented Photo Review Challenge-takers could find in their subjects. Once again, as the photos reproduced here show, we were not disappointed.

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.