People always ask what I do in the off-season. Do I take month long vacations and adventure to places I’ve never been? Sometimes 😉 But mostly, the off-season allows me to do things for the business that I simply don’t have time to do when I’m busy on photo shoots and editing, blogging, and delivering thousands of photos. One of those things being getting my photos out to other blogs, submitting to magazines, sharing photos with vendors, and entering photo contests. This year, I submitted 50 of my favorite photos from 2015 to The Shoot and Share Photo Contest. It’s is a free contest by shootandshare.com which has 25 categories, some of them including: Just the Bride, Bride/Groom, Wedding Party, Just the Guests, etc. Contestants can submit to any of those categories, and voters can look through all the photos randomly and vote for their favorites without knowing who took those photos.

The Photo Contest is only about the photos; not the photographer, his or her popularity, how many friends or how much money they have. Everyone is a judge and gets a chance to vote. A group of 4 photos is shown and out of the 4 you select your favorite. Then, this keeps happening in random groups of fours in the same category. People vote as much as they want for as long as they want. Each category has a 1st, 2nd, and a 3rd place winner as well as an overall Grand Prize Winner for the contest.

With thousands of submissions, unfortunately I did not place in the Top 3 in any category, but a few of my photos did make the Top 10, 20, and 30% and one of my photos placed 21st place out of nearly 7,500 entries in that category! I’m disappointed I didn’t place as high as I had hoped, but it only fuels me to become a better photographer in the future! Here’s to pushing my limits in 2016 🙂

TOP 30% 

 

 

 

TOP 20% 

 

 

TOP 10% 

 

 

21st Place out of 7,490 entries