Whew!
I can usually be heard around this time of month breathing just such a sigh of relief as I browse through the growing number of entries in the current Photos.com Challenge on Graphics.com. If you're not familiar with it, the concept itself has been around for some time: visitors can download and modify an image, then upload it to a gallery where others can add comments. Sounds simple. And in fact, the Challenge began simply enough in February of last year with the base image at right.
The original motivation was to provide a way to show off the wide variety of imagery in the Photos.com stock photo subscription service, which had begun a phase of rapid expansion that continues today, with 160,000 images currently available to subscribers. So I began by searching through the collection, looking for single, dramatic images that could be made available each month.
As it happened, Graphics.com members took to the concept immediately, posting inventive variations on the original images. Participants ranged from relative amateurs to professional pixel pushers, with some motivated by the chance to win one of the three monthly Photos.com subscriptions but most simply driven by the desire to stretch out a little and participate in what quickly became a very friendly, supportive environment.
Things took a new turn last October, when while poking through my short list of Halloween-related images the thought occured to me: what if I provided two images and let participants choose which one to riff on? Not only did this produce lots of great entries, but some folks created compelling hybrid illustrations using both images. Well, as you might imagine, there was no going back at that point. My personal challenge had become finding multiple Photos.com images that had something in common and then specifying how many of them needed to be used within the entries. The number of images soon went from two, to three and now, this month, to four.
Some months I've provided sets of vintage black-and-white shots or textures. There have been maps, Eastern imagery, cows (!), crumbling ruins, facial closeups, you name it. For October I picked four closeups of the Eiffel Tower, with the challenge being to use at least of three of them. This is perhaps the toughest competition yet and for the first few days I checked the Challenge page anxiously. As the week wore on, I was starting to wonder if this time I had really gone too far—then boom, the entries started appearing, with some of them being truly inspired. As I said at the outset: Whew!
Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com
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