Tdot Shots Toronto Photo Contest Awards 2020 (View Gallery and Critique)
Introduction and Greetings
Tdot Shots and our sponsor ProLab Canada would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who supported our contest and participated. We awarded 3 prizes to the finalists in our categories: city & town, community and GTA FFA. Congrats to the winners!
Are you curious about the entries and judging? We are happy to tell you more about our process and give insights into what made the winning photos standouts. We’ll also tip our hats to shots that were finalists. Read on for our critique!
Quick Background / Our Inspiration
2020 has been a very unusual year to say the least. In spring we got the idea to host our 2nd annual photo contest early. Last year it took place in late fall and this year we bumped it up to early summer. We wanted to inspire the community during a dark time. Our theme and title was “Create Community” – and we hope we motivated our community of photographers and content creators to make something beautiful during the crisis.
Our contest celebrated a variety of styles and locations. We welcomed general urban shots for City & Town and extended the boundary from the Toronto/GTA region to the Golden Horseshoe. To enhance this expanded view of styles we came up the “GTA FFA,” a new category, focused on “free for all” edits of images from around Greater Toronto. Along with the GTA FFA we also wanted to see more portrait and street shots from the community so we launched the additional new category “Community.”
Our Judges and Judging Process
We are grateful to our judges for taking the time to consider finalists for the contest. Judges were: Mike Simpson @mikesimpson.ms, @rajeevkugan and @tylersjourney.
Our judges bookmarked and downloaded favourites posted over the 6 weeks from May 15 to July 1. When it came time to narrow down the list we used the following process:
- Top entries under hashtag #tdot_CC20
- Our favourite general picks (about 50 made it)
- Comments by the community when we posted the finalists
It was an interesting and democratic process. There was some consensus but we determined the winners by adding up by scoring. Each judge picked a final 3 for each category and 1st pick got 3 pts, 2nd 2 pts and 3rd received 1 pt. After this tally we had two clear winners and a tie. To break the tie we consulted with comments on our Instagram finalists posts to help us decide.
WINNERS – CRITIQUE & GALLERY
Here are the winners by category. Congrats all! Hope you enjoy your $100 printing credits from sponsor ProLab Canada!
PHOTO CRITIQUE
Some thoughts from the judges:
Community Winner @jibin_street_photography:
“The photographer captured a random encounter with a cyclist. The sequence is amazing,” said our judge. Jibin had multiple shots nominated for the community category, including portrait and street shots.
City and Town Winner @to.pixels:
“This sunrise capture stood out immediately from the bunch of shots from my picks – the lighting and natural feel with the subject in place made it complete”
GTA FFA Winner @eagle.hawks.eyes: “Heavy fantasy edit. The same creator put my shot of the dog jumping in a lightbulb – definitely inventive and creative!”
Winners Gallery
Swipe or click to view all the images
