Back in January, we entered the annual Shoot and Share photo contest. (You may have seen our posts on Facebook and Instagram asking you to vote!) It is a remarkable contest that is free to enter and anyone can vote in. And over the last few weeks they've been sharing the results. And, wow, are they amazing! There are so many truly gifted photographers out there!
So, for this year's contest, 10,00 photographers submitted 332,768 photos over 25 categories. When voting opened, every day or so, photos were eliminated and another round of voting was opened, with a total of 12 rounds (which was the finalist round). There are some really fun statistics about the contest, like that more than 150,000 people from 156 countries were involved and 60 million votes were cast with one million favorites.
I am incredibly proud of our results this year. We had four photos (out of more than 330,000!) make it to the finalist rounds. Last year was my first year entering, and we didn't receive any high rankings (one photo made it as far as round five). I am incredibly excited to participate again next year to see how much we continue to grow as photographers.
Now, without further ado (because we've all waited a long time for all these results!), here are our images that earned recognition this year.
The Finalists
Those that made it to round 12 were in the finalist round! The finalists were the top 3.5 percent of all of the photos in the category. Two of my images made it to this round, both in the Wanderlust category. There were 11,905 photos submitted in that category, these two pictures made it in the top 500 of those submitted! How crazy!
I took this picture at Glacier National Park last summer. Jared and I were invited to a wedding in Montana and a wedding in Iowa a week later, so we decided to fly to Idaho, rent a car and work our way to the weddings, five National Parks and a few other sites and back home. After the wedding in Montana, we spent a day in Glacier, and it was absolutely stunning! There were so many different things, from flowing rivers to snowy hikes (and we all know how much I LOVE snow!). Definitely my favorite of the National Parks we were able to explore this past summer.
We were also able to go to Yellowstone National Park. We only allotted a day there, but ended up spending two (which made for some very late driving on some scary roads after that second night). There were so many great places in the park, and probably a lot we didn't get to see, but perhaps my favorite was the Grand Prismatic hot spring. All of these colors appear naturally from minerals in the water. Stunning.
Top 30 Percent
Photos in that made it to the top 30 percent made it to at least round six (or possibly as far as round 11, depending on the number of entries). These two images below were selected for the top 30 percent!
One of my favorites from our styled shoot with the Tuesday Together group of the Rising Tide Society made it in the top 30 percent! As I was looking through the results, another photographer from the shoot submitted a photo of one of these lovely models holding a cute little dog; it did better than this one! :)
This image was submitted to the Styled Shoot category and was in the top 2,000 of almost 9,000 submissions. You can see more from our styled session here.
This cutie made it in the top 6,300 of nearly 23,000 children's pictures. I just love this picture because she kept sticking out her tongue like this. Adorable! More pictures from this wonderful family's session can be found here.
The contest really is a reflection of the how we all perceive photography differently; there were some photos I submitted from last year that I love, but didn't do as well as I'd hoped. That's so similar to our experience with clients; what is often my favorite photo, isn't necessarily theirs. But the ones that they love aren't always the most technical photography work. That's one of the great things about photography, and this contest! I can't wait for next year!