Photocritic photography blog

Combine a good old-fashioned team-based treasure hunt with a photography competition, and you’ve got a recipe for success, right?

Well, that’s what I thought too, when I signed up to attend Shoot London, an event based out of the Tate gallery, organised by Shoot Experience, a company who organises these kind of events for public and corporate events.

Sadly, it turns out that I’ll probably give future Shoot Experience events a miss - to find out why, I spoke to another participant of the event… Read the rest of the article »

Right, the winners for the competition have been picked! By deadline, there were 151 competition entries, and I used Random.org to pick the winners.

The winners are:

#2 - ryan97ou
#88 - Luís Brás
#120 - John Jimenez
#116 - Tim Norris
#98 - Aaron Snowden

I’ll e-mail you all as soon as to get your addresses so I can ship the books out to you. CONGRATULATIONS!

Original competition for posterity: Read the rest of the article »

Recently, Wired.com has started doing a series of very cool photography contests, and I’ve been meaning to recommend them to people for a while.

Participating in photography contests is generally a good idea, actually: It keeps you on your toes, and it very much helps to keep thinking about what you are doing with your photographic work. This week’s contest is particularly interesting, though… Read the rest of the article »

I was recently asked to be one of the judges in a photography contest run by Crestock. (more about the competition in one of my previous posts). It’s a pretty high-profile affair: The prizes are very good, and there’s a lot of judges on the panel, including some esteemed bloggers, experienced writers, and successful stock photographers.

When it comes to this competition, it works like this: As one of the judges, I choose the 10 photographs I like best. For round 1, that meant choosing 10 out of 491 photographs. In other words, for every 50 photos, I can only choose one. Words can’t describe quite how difficult that is: A lot of talent and creativity goes into competition entries, and a lot can be said about.

I won’t lie to you - while I am a moderately successful blogger (hey, you’re reading my blog right now, aren’t you?), a soon-to-be-published author (my book goes on sale in about a month and a half) and a washed-up freelance / stock photographer who decided that I could only do photography as a hobby, because doing it for the money was soul-destroying - I have never actually judged a competition before. While the guys at Crestock were quite helpful in offering guidelines and ideas as to what I should be looking for, it got me a-thinking: What can you, as a photographer, do to maximise your chances in the battle of shutter times and lighting, against the rest of the pack? Read the rest of the article »

I got an e-mail from Crestock a while back, asking me if I wanted to be one of the judges for a photography competition. My response was something along the lines of ‘yah, sure, I’ll give it a whirl’, and then, I promptly forgot about it.

Then, they got back to me and told me what the competition prize is: A Canon EOS 1Ds mk2, complete with a Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM lens. ! I feel cheated, because by being one of the judges, I can’t enter the competition myself, and I obviously can’t win the goodies myself.

As such, I guess I’ll just write about the competition here on Photocritic: If I can’t win, I may as well give one of you lot the chance… Go on, dear readers, do me proud! Read the rest of the article »

The hawk-eyed among you will have noticed that we’ve got a couple of new features here on Photocritic. The most noticeable is a competitions calendar in the sidebar on the Photocritic home page.

You might have spotted that I’ve every now and again included some competitions into the site. This is because I love the idea of using competitions to turn you into a better photographer. Sadly, keeping a complete list of photography competitions up to date is damn near impossible, especially because that would detract from some of the other things I would like to talk about here on Photocritic. Instead, I’ve teamed up with the gang over at Photo Competitions. You should probably subscribe to their news feed anyway, but just in case you forget about entering a competition, you will have a reminder in the sidebar!

The other news item is that I’ve started promoting Earth Shots a bit more, by including their ‘photo of the day’ in the sidebar of the article pages. I really enjoy their photos, and quite frequently they serve as a reminder of why I became a photographer in the first place — to capture some of the beauty we surround us with.

Photo Competitions and Earth Shots — Welcome to Photocritic!

Sweet baby jesus, I’m actually rather hyped about the PhotographyCorner’s 2006 Photograph of the Year contest. They’ve got a massive $14K worth of prizes, too. Read the rest of the article »

Peeling the plastic of the issue of New Scientist magazine I just received in the mail, I dropped the mag on the ground. It fell page-open on page 51, which happened to be a photography competition. Now I’m not supersticious, particularly, but I definitely felt it was a sign to share it with you lot!

Competition entries can be viewed here, and you can add your own entries at the same URL. Get your submissions in, you can win a Canon EOS 400D!

If you like clothing, photography, and are between sixteen and twenty-five years of age, you’d be bloody nuts not to enter the Nikon Young Fashion Photographer of the Year awards! Read the rest of the article »

As far as presenting photographs goes, you can’t get much more unique than having it professionally transferred onto proper artists’ canvas. To some, it could be prohibitively expensive, but Tocco are currently running a competition where, if you win, you can get your photo printed completely for free! Read the rest of the article »