I'm a FINALIST--2019 Shoot & Share Photo Contest Results | Arizona Family Photographer
I’m proud to say that I made it to be a finalist in the largest global annual photo contest!
At the beginning of each year, there is this GIANT global photo contest happening—The Shoot & Share Photo Contest. It is probably the world’s largest contest. It’s free. It’s super fair. It’s amazingly fun. We had 583,150 photos in total submitted by photographers from all around the world. Yes, you read it right. We had almost 600K photos.
And guess what? I actually made it to be a FINALIST! Yay!
Ok. Let’s recap just in case you are not familiar with how this contest works and why this is actually kinda a big deal for me.
In the contest, each photographer are allowed to submit 50 unique images total into 25 different categories. Then all the images will be put into random set of 4s in each category to be voted on. When a voter gets on the voting page, the screen will show a random set from a random category and the voter will click on his/her favorite and then a new random set will show up automatically. Once all images have been seen enough times(probably hundreds and hundreds of times at least), one round ends and they will make a cut at the bottom and the top images go into the next round. After 12 rounds of voting, we will have the winners and we will be able to see each of our images’ placement in that category.
Being an engineering major, I’d just like to play with the numbers for a sec here. Each of us can submit up to 50 photos and we have a total of close to 600k photos, the possibility of finding one of my own image is…pretty much close to zero. Of course, the algorithm is a lot more complicated than just a possibility calculation here. This is why this contest is actually really fair. It’s a pure popularity contest but there is no way anyone could affect the results just because he or she knows a few more people in the circle. You get the idea.
This is the second year for me to be in the contest. I do it mostly to hold myself accountable—having an annual competition helps me to push myself harder to create contest quality images throughout the year. Also this is an amazing learning opportunity. I mean, seriously, where else can you see so many photos from all over the world all at one place?! With that being said, while I know I still have long ways to go to be where I really want to be in the industry, I compare with how I did last year more in this contest than with how other people did.
Without further ado, here are my results!
As you can see, this year I have 27 images out of my 50 submissions ended up in the top 30% while I only had 5 images in the top 30% last year. This is a huge jump for me and I’m really happy about the improvements I’ve made within this one year.
I also have one image that made it to the finalist round, top 500, and placed 336th in the Family Photo Category(with a total of 41,257 submissions). I’ll have to say, it feels GUUUUUD to be among the top 500 family photos in the world. And as a family photographer, I am super excited that one of my clients’ family photo placed the best.
At the same time, I also entered a few images of documentation of my own family life into the lifestyle/documentary category and I’m soooo glad that many of them placed well too. While I LOOOOVE all my clients’ families, I just can’t love any family more than my own. It is just special to me to see that people really like to see the real life stuff too.
While I might have spent way too much time voting, I’m definitely beyond excited to see the results. Of course, I’ll have to say THANK YOU to all the families who have trusted my vision and let me create magic in the past year. You probably have no idea how much it means to me to have a family fully trust me with their family photo sessions—starting from the location choice, to personalized styling, and all the way to the fun intimate session experience. What even means more to me is that in this industry where weddings are the obvious special occasion to be remembered, so many people have put their effort, emotions and investments into preserving family memories as well.
It has been a good year and here is to an even better year of 2019! Let’s make some magic!
Enjoy the little slideshow I put together <3
