First round of Nominees! Sports Category! Believe it or not we only had just over 300 entries, this was our smallest group. As far as this particular category went, I asked myself a few questions when judging them:
1. Is the image compelling and engaging? (Did it make me stop and look at it?- If so, it is pretty much instantly nominated).
2. Is the image technically good enough to appear in Sports Illustrated? Not just exposure and shutter speed, but was it artistic enough to appear in a high end Sports magazine? Many qualified on this basis alone.
3. Is the image unique? There were many, many images that were strikingly similar to other entires, in those cases I often went with the better of the two. The first year we had a contest, I kid you not I had 4 sunflower shots that were almost identical. I have to pick the strongest.
4. How many compositional themes were included? Shapes? Textures? Rule of Thirds?
There were many images that were great shots, but not so much compelling or technically sound. A lot of this is really subjective, many of the images I did not nominate would have qualified in other contests, so please do not take it personally.
As a side note: We thought we had a solution that could manage both Flash and HTML5 (for Apple Devices like an iPad or iPhone) but we couldnt get the software to work. We are still looking at it, but until then, we will have to use this flash based player. I sincerely apologize, but if you are using a mobile device that doesnt like Flash, you wont be able to view it from your device.
Congratulations to all who are nominated!
Superb selection… very nice.. 🙂
Congratulations everyone……….those in front and behind the lens!
Thanks Michael for doing this:)
Sure is exciting to see al the pictures playing out in front of you and with added upbeat music!
Great pics. That wave photo is amazing…very cool. Good luck to everyone…
Now having seen them all, I meant the first wave photo, but they were all pretty sweet…
My fav’s – 14, 25, and 29 🙂 But My utmost favourite is # 34 – Great Job Everyone – I Love seeing the creativity!
All I can say is WOW, there are some mind blowing images in there! I feel really bad for the judges :)!
Wow, Wow and more Wow,
Congrats to all of you. These are all top notch photos, I was completely blown away! Would not be able to narrow it down to only one winner.
I like the first wave photo, the little kid boxer with older man by his side, the basketball Buddhists and the airplanes with colorful smoke.
Beautiful pics… Stunned to see some clicks… no doubt the contest will be intresting.. 🙂
Thanks Michael for organizing such a wonderful contest… 🙂
I hope this slide show is of all the entries and not what has been selected as finalist. Some of these shots look like the photographer is a professional in sports photography. Ex. NFL photos you have to have media pass to get on the sidelines to shoot pictures which would indicate your a professional in the the sports arena. Lets be fair if this is for amateur photographers.
Congrats to all, wonderful and amazing shots, its going to be hard to pick a winner…!
WOW! Everyone in this category is AMAZING! I feel so honored to be nominated among them! Although I do agree with Tammy, but hey, lets give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they didn’t read the rules throughly. Hopefully if they know now, they will gracefully bow out, not make it to the next round since it was stated in the rules. To all others nominated, great job!