Photo Challenge

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.

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.

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.

The idea for this photo challenge came from photographer R. Ian Lloyd (see ‘Be Prepared’ in Photo Review 34). One of the very first challenges he faced as a young photography student was how to come up with a good picture of a humble egg. The difficulty factor of this apparently simple exercise was obviously pretty high, because we received fewer entries than usual. However, it was good to see that a hardy band of our most stalwart Photo Review Challenge lenspersons were undeterred by the complexity of rendering simplicity. It was a competitive group as you can see, but in the end we gave the nod to Craig Mitchell for seeing the shape of an egg in a most unexpected place.

We’ve posed some tough challenges over the last 30 issues, but judging from the number of entries we received, ‘the smallest room in the house’ must have been the most difficult yet. Still, whilst we didn’t get as many competitors as is usual, the standard of the submissions was uniformly strong. As many artists know, working on a small canvas with only a limited range of options often leads to more than usually creative expression.

The response to our Shadowland Photo Challenge was one of the most impressive we’ve yet seen. Choosing the winner was, as always, a great struggle. But in the end, we felt we had to give the nod to Damien Siviero for a picture he captured 10 metres below the sea in a cave near a spot known as Splendid Arch in New Zealand’s Poor Knight Islands. As you will see, this photograph was competing for first place not only with the rest of the field but with two other extraordinary images from Damien’s lens.

Asked to do a bit of roadwork, our photo challengers responded with enthusiasm and creativity. The brief was to create images that somehow conveyed the spirit of ‘the long and winding road’. Once again the judging task was not an easy one, but in the end we had to go for Adam Donnelly’s moody study.

PR30 Photo Challenge seemed simple on the surface. We asked photographers to do something interesting with a tree or trees. It is surprisingly difficult to see such a commonplace object in a new and fresh way, but see it thusly our winner and runners-up most certainly did.