Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/02/03
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The photo contest is anonymous. Unless the entrant's work is well enough known that you can look at it and say "Oh, yes, that's by Steve Barbour" then the judges look only at the image itself. The image that came in dead last in the January contest was this one, entitled "Snow 5": http://contest.leica-users.org/main.php/v/0801/IMG_4117.jpg.html Once the results of the contest were published and I saw that this image was by Mads Christensen, who lives in Iraq, my opinion of the image totally changed. Suddenly the brown parts of the image weren't just "brown crud" they were "sands of Iraq", and suddenly the little patches of snow took on a much more complex meaning. Mads is, to my knowledge, the only LUGger who lives in Iraq or who has been there recently, so if he had given this picture a caption identifying it as "Snow in Iraq" we would all have known whose image it was. I'm not a judge, but like all of the rest of you I have opinions about photographs, and I find that now that I know what this picture is, I'm fascinated by it, especially by the "Full size" version. But the knowledge that it came from Iraq, and was therefore taken by Mads Christensen, is a necessary part of that fascination. Curious. I don't think it would work to revise contest rules, but this might be worth thinking about.