Thanks again to Unicycle.com who sponsored prizes. If any of you winners are reading this before you check your email, I’ve sent you a note and will confirm later about which UDC to contact regarding your prize.
The CTM is currently open to photos for the next contest, which will end about 6 months from now. Currently we’re working on updating the site. At that time any photos entered before March 31st will be organized as part of the previous contest.
Thanks to everyone who entered and rated entries. Congrats and great photos!
Congrats to the winners! A lot of great photos in the contest.
I have some suggestions for future contests.
I would make the contest submission and voting periods shorter. One month to submit photos, one month to vote on them, something like that. I would not open up voting until all the photos are submitted. With the current setup, there’s not really an incentive to go back and look at new photos, which is exacerbated by the fact that:
The site just doesn’t work very well. Lots of problems with uploading, inherent result bias due to the square format of the thumbnails (it’s not coincidence that the winners all have the major activity in the center of the frame), and poor browsing options. I know Carl has put a ton of work into it, but he’s basically trying to reimplement Flickr with additional complex rules. You’d be better off running the contest in a Flickr group.
I still like the concept, but I’m not sure I’d participate again in the same format.
Flickr, despite it’s popularity, can’t handle the back-end photo, rating and license management in the way we want it. Look for some updates in the coming while. If you want to email me with specific suggestions though, feel free.
More frequent periods brings it’s own challenge in terms of prize sponsorship cost. While it’s technically a contest, I think the main value it brings is to give us a central place for the best and most diverse photos for our sport. In that sense the contest period length really doesn’t matter.
Nice work everyone! However I’m surprised at the choice of the Sportsmanship photo. Really? Take an extra-colorful background and render it down to almost no color at all? I like the composition though.
But only at three per person. Too bad it’s not possible for the real “artists” out there to be able to show a quantity of work more in proportion to their skills.
If Carl wants to keep playing with the programming end, how about a system that puts high-scoring images toward the front and the lowest ones at the back? Or maybe even drop off the lowest-scoring ones, making room for new photos? This type of approach would work better as an ongoing system, though prizes could still be awarded periodically.
The main idea was to focus on the colors of Adrien’s unicycle, some of the background pictures than faded away. the photo wasn’t edited with Photoshop or any other program, I simply took the photo with different option on the camera itself, so I hadn’t any control over which colour of the background would fade.
Sorry you didn’t like it, I personally wasn’t to impress by it too, I would have preferred my “Playing some Cuban songs” to won the landscape category. As for the Cultural category, I think the one with the two African guy trying the 36" should have won, but then, it wasn’t even in second or third place if I remember well. That in my opinion is a small problem.
Having the pictures voted by impartial judges would be great, it would give a some credibility to the contest and maybe the best unicyclist photograph would want to submit their pictures. right now it is more a contest of “who is going to have to most friend voting”.
Still, a great idea and concept, once more Kris Holm is proving to be a important figure in the development of unicycling with his innovation and support to unicyclist.
