Blurb Book Contest: People's Choice

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In a previous post, I asked for your help
in a book making contest at Blurb. This is one more request for help.

The Blurb contest has drawn in over 2000 contestants from around the world. Apparently Blurb thought there would be several hundred instead of several thousand entries. Blurb has decided to add a "People's Choice" category and allow registered Blurbarians to vote for their favorite. All the contest entries are at this link; my own entry is here.

You can only vote once and must be registered at Blurb to vote. Registration is relatively simple and if you are inclined to make your own book I can recommend Blurb having done three personal books there with a fourth in progress.

Voting ends on September 10 and the winners will be announced September 19.
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PopPhoto Shootout 2007: Summary and Links

I enjoyed participating in PopPhoto’s 2007 Shootout and learned a lot in the process. Here are the links to my blog entries for the various phases of the contest.

PopPhoto Winner (not me!)
The contest and qualifying
1st assignment: your first name
2nd assignment: portait including rock, paper, scissors
3rd assignment: documentary (my documentary)

In PopPhoto’s forums, I made recommendations for next year’s contest, including

- organize results of assignments alphabetically by photographer
- give a little more advance notice for documentary assignments
- require a short descriptive paragraph of the documentary
- publish the winning documentary
- allow batch uploading of images
- keep images together in the gallery.

Wait ‘til next year!

PopPhoto Shootout 2007: Third Assignment

All along, I had assumed that one of the PopPhoto 2007 Shootout assignments would be a photojournalistic documentary. The only questions in my mind were the topic and number of photos. Depending on my location when the assignment was posted, I had several options. If on the Mississippi coast, my intention was more photos for a documentary on Hurricane Katrina damage and recovery – a project that I’m working on anyway.

As things turned out, the third assignment was a “creative documentary” and I was on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; however, the topic of the documentary was to “capture a day in the life of any job (though not an office job)”. There was a bonus assignment as well: photograph a unicorn.

I immediately dismissed the unicorn assignment as a joke which, of course, turned out to be a mistake. I should have just gone along with the joke.

I had a problem with this documentary assignment. For one thing, not only do I have an office job but virtually all my family and friends have “office” jobs. Also, I was away from home and reluctant to impose on someone’s day. Although my mother and sister had a few ideas, none of them appealed to me – and the clock was ticking.

Determined to complete the third assignment and finish the contest, I finally came up with an idea for my documentary. Granted, it was a bit of a stretch, but first we had to clean up my dad’s workshop.