BBC

Confidence

For 3 years, Meteored has been launching its #MetContest24 meteorological photography contest in June in which amateurs and professionals from 11 countries choose to take a professional weather station.

The contest is held in a completely digital way, through Meteored’s social channels and anyone residing in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Portugal or Spain can participate in it.

It is a powerful tool to connect with a community of fans that adds up to about 200,000 people on social networks, among which are numerous photography fans and meteorologists.

How to participate in the #MetContest24?

Participating is very simple, it is not even necessary to be present on social networks to do so. Just send the image with a minimum quality of 300 dpi to the email enabled for the contest: [email protected]. The email must also include the following information: name of the author, title, place where it was taken and the author’s Instagram username (if you have it). Example: “Yolanda Silviera. Title: Relentless Lightning. London. Instagram @usert”. Check the rules of the contest for more details.

The deadline for receiving the images begins on June 24 and ends on July 7, 2024. Voting will take place until July 14 on Instagram.

As a curiosity, this year the bases have had to be modified to make an express reference to AI, because already in previous editions some attempt to participate in images created with artificial intelligence was detected, totally or partially, and it is expected that this year, that this technology has been more democratized much more, the concurrence of this type of images could be even greater. So the bases this year make it clear that only natural images, not altered or created with AI, can participate in the contest.

Choosing the winning photo: a team effort

The choice of the winning photograph is made in two phases. The first takes place on social networks, where users vote through “likes” and the 10 images with the most votes are chosen as finalists.

Here lies another of the novelties of this edition, because, unlike previous years, the votes will take place exclusively on Instagram. The social network of images par excellence will be the place where the images that will be published with both Meteored’s global profile and in the author’s country of residence can be voted on.

Once the voting phase is over, the 10 images with the most “likes” will become the finalists and will be sent to a jury, composed of members of the Meteored international news team, who will choose the winning image of this edition, which will be announced on 22 July, 2024.

The author of the winning image will take a professional weather station, equipped with outdoor solar energy sensor, rain collector, wind indicator, UV radiation meter and humidity sensor. In addition to an LCD screen and wireless technology that allows you to transmit data over a Wi-Fi connection.

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“I have a counterproposal: A Street Photographer Gets Serious about Place,” says photographer Allen Wheatcroft to the Phoblographer in an interview when we asked about how his thought process changes based on being in the suburbs. After explaining that he’s not, we can’t help but think that this is all we see in stark contrast to much of his other work. This is a clear demonstration of the power of framing. “…in one sense this project answers the question ‘what would I have if I took street photos mostly without the people?’ The project is about the places where people live and the ways they make places their own – or try to.”

All images by Allen Wheatcroft. Used with permission. For more, please check out his website and Instagram @ajwheatphoto. Be sure to check out his book Björkevägen and The Northside at the publisher.

It’s important for Allen that he didn’t drop in briefly and move on to create the photos that we see in the rest of his portfolio. Much of the photos take place in Chicago — a place he calls home. “I’d like to say that it then expanded in neat concentric waves, but the expansion wasn’t so neat, more like a dropped jar of jam, messy,” he tells us. However, this project required a different approach. Much of his other work is put together in the edit and then arranged into a book. For this, he was thinking about the book from the onset.

In The Northside, the northern tier of Chicago’s neighborhoods forms the center of gravity. The photos in Björkevägen were taken in Sörmland, a mostly rural area in Sweden. The Sweden photos come from a few villages, a small city, and coastal resort, a town that also hosts some light industry. 

Allen Wheatcroft

Allen Wheatcroft first got into photography in his early 20s. He borrowed his brother’s Pentax SLR and began taking photos of people on the streets. “The ’thing’ was the ability to see and create relationships among people and things,” he tells us. These days, he’s using a Leica Q2 along with a Leica SL2 and 24-90mm lens. “One street habit I kept was to carry a camera with me when not purposefully shooting,” he tells us. “The SL2 is too bulky for this, so I often had a mirrorless Sony rx100.” Indeed, he’s going for showcasing images that look human and not like they’re made by a Generative AI.

In fact, Allen hasn’t been disturbed by AI just yet because it hasn’t crept into his world. “I’m not doing documentary or news or persuasive stuff, where AI seems downright dangerous,” he states. “I’m still enough of a street photographer to have in mind Garry Winogrand’s aphorism: ‘I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.’ But I’m also after a conversation.” To that end, he’s avoided the new Adobe AI tools.

He’s reached a point where so many modern photographers have yet to reach: thinking about photo books first. It’s something that we see with Cig Harvey and Jens Krauer. Both of these folks are ones we’d consider true photographers first — and perhaps any other label you wish second.

“When laying the book out, I had, of course, a new level of relationships – among the pictures – to work with,” Allex explains. For two years, he and Caleb Cain Marcus (who designed his other book) worked on laying it out. “For more than two years, Caleb and I worked together on photo selections, sequence and movement, layout, etc. that would create/keep the mood and feeling of the shooting. Our goal was to keep a feeling of freedom, which, despite the constraints, I had as I shot.”

The two looked for variety, humor, ways to elicit smiles, mystery, chose specific colors that they felt supported the goal, etc.

“There aren’t many people in the photographs we selected – none in The Northside – yet we felt that the images themselves are human, and we chose scale to reinforce that.”

AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT

The Phoblographer works with human photographers to verify that they’ve actually created their work through shoots. These are done by providing us assets such as BTS captures, screenshots of post-production, extra photos from the shoot, etc. We do this to help our readers realize that this is authentically human work. Here’s what this photographer provided for us.