I decided recently that I wanted to participate in some kind of weekly photography challenge. My goal is not to win prizes or acclaim or anything like that. I feel that participating in a regular submission style process would create for me a kind of accountability to keep me engaged in taking photo’s and working on different aspects of my photography. Additionally the assignment type nature of the weekly challenge would help me exercise my creativity to meet the criteria for each challenge.
Searching for a challenge brought me to several pages with wide ranges of styles and types of challenges/contests. A challenge site that I thought was interesting and something to aspire to was DPChallenge. The photo’s I looked at on the page were incredible. The challenges were highly structured with very specific requirements about the subject of the challenge, when you could take photo’s for the challenges and the kind of editing allowed for submissions. They run several challenges concurrently, which I also liked. It is however a pay site where you have to be a member to participate in the challenges, which isn’t something I am interested in at this time. I also feel that I need to become a more polished photographer to be ready for their challenges.
The next place I looked was at PhotoSunday. I thought it was a nice site with a good concept of running a weekly challenge. Give the readers a theme and let them submit a link to their picture of choice for that theme. Its a much more relaxed atmosphere than DPC, with no rules about when the picture was taken or editing requirements etc. However the page seems to have a very low volume of traffic. With one day left on the current challenge, there are only 27 submissions (one of which is Marie’s, go vote for it).
The one I finally settled on to give a try is PhotoFriday. Similar to PhotoSunday in its method of organizing the challenge, the site has a more structured voting process with a cool viewer window for seeing all of the links without actually leaving the PhotoFriday page. There is also a much larger volume of traffic, which will hopefully translate into more traffic for our page. The “rules” are still pretty open with no requirements to speak of. I am however setting one requirement for myself in regard to these challenges. I am limiting myself to only photographs taken after the challenge subject has been posted this will hopefully force me to get out every week and flex my photography muscles.
This weeks challenge is “noon”. A nice easy concept to photograph right?…
[...] the course of pursuing my goal of participating in the PhotoFriday challenge every week for the last few weeks I have run into a [...]