As some of you may or may not know, I have been involved in a few camera giveaways this year. I gave away a Leica iiic earlier in the year myself, but since then I have also been involved in a couple of giveaway contests that Ray Larose has put on – my role has been one of 3 judges.

I haven’t mentioned these past giveaways on here for the sole reason that they were both for SLR cameras. Ray’s latest contest is a little different though, this time it is giving away just the sort of camera I like to shoot… A Rollei 35T.

There’s little point in me going into to much detail of the ins and outs of the contest, as you can find all the details on how to enter on Ray’s site here, but I did want to give a little hint as to what I personally will be looking for when I am judging the entries…

The contest is based around the idea of telling a story through a series of 4 images, those 4 images can be of whatever you like, and taken with whatever camera you like. The key is that they tell a story. Having judged the last two competitions, I will say that one thing we all agreed was that some of the entries were a little lacking in a sense of narrative.

Interestingly, the winning images from the first contest were actually those that inspired my shooting of my wife in hospital the other day. Thankfully, my wife isn’t as gravely ill as I suspect the woman featured in Steve Cowell’s rather touching images is. The narrative I was looking to portray was not the one of confusion and sadness as so well portrayed in Steve’s images, but more one of boredom and mild frustration at being stuck in a hospital. You can see the full set here in yesterday’s post.

Of course for the sake of fitting in with Ray’s rules, the images need to be square and need to be in a 4×4 collage. So, If I was allowed to enter the competition, which clearly I am not, this is what I would enter.

Now of course, you can’t tell us message you are looking to portray in the images you submit. The point is, we’re suppose to be able to extract that message ourselves. Hopefully the images above in my 4×4 collage give a clue as to the sort of level of narrative we are looking for. I’m not for one minute saying my photos are particularly good, but regardless of their subjective merits, I do think they tell a fairly easy to grasp story of a bored young woman stuck in a hospital.

So there’s a nice big hint from one of the judges of a competition to win an awesome camera… You really have no excuse not to enter! More info on Ray’s website here!