Picture Your World - Nature

Results December 2011

Woophy is proud to announce the winner of the December contest Christian C. From almost 2,000 entries we chose his photo of the "Wasp Spider" as the one most representing nature.

We liked his macro photo because there was a lot of life in it. Some macro photos are very aesthetic or can look almost "frozen" but this photo is in every perspective dynamic. Not only the spider itself balancing upside down between the flowers, but also the colorful composition of the photo, the lines of the web and the plants and the clouds are full of live.

Also we liked the fact that it is a very special picture of a very common subject which is always more interesting than the other way around.

After having made a long list of nine photos it was clear to us that we would bring Christians C's photo to Mars if we had to explain nature on earth to a Martian. If you look closer there are many essential elements of nature in this composition. I mean there is flora and fauna, we have reproduction (the flowers), death(the almost dried out grass), water, sky, oxygen, photo syntheses etc.

I think for an abstract subject as "nature" it is impossible to find one photo that "says it all" but this one sure comes close.

Congratulations Christian you won our first competition this year.

Jury report and long list

To be honest we were a bit surmised by the large amount of entries to the competition and the judging was a bit more work than we expected.

So this is how we did it. At first all three of us at Woophy Rotterdam could assign a ‘yes’, a ‘no’ or a ‘maybe’ to a photo. At first we were quite generous with assigning ‘yes’ but in second viewings and third viewings we became more and more critical. For me the most important initial selection criteria were a. is it an interesting photo and b. does it say something interesting about nature.

In the end we had left about 100 photos with one or more yes votes. At that moment we started to discuss and convince each other.

Then we found out that we all had looked differently towards the subject. Where I had excluded most photos with humans, Erik chose often photos about the relationship between man and nature.

Therefore we decided to make three subcategories; Landscapes, Animals, and Man versus Nature. This way it was easier to come to a long list.

The following nine photos made it to the long list. To choose a winner for this list was a bit –as we say in The Netherlands- comparing apples and pears but at the end we all three agreed on the photo by Christian.