The theme for the second round of the Camera Jabber Photographer of the Year (CJPOTY) competition was ‘Urban Abstracts’ and there were some fantastic images. After considerable debate, we are delighted to reveal that the following images will go into our shortlist to be judged by our illustrious panel at the end of the year. One of these superb images has also been selected as the round winner with the photographer being awarded a voucher from MPB worth £500 – scroll down to find out who.
CJPOTY February 2022 Urban Abstracts shortlisted images
Liz Hammond
Liz was reminded of the round window in the BBC’s ‘Play School’ when she captured this image with her Canon EOS 90D and EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 lens. She thinks something wonderful maybe happening through it. You just might be right, Liz!
Monica Vella
Monica captured this super image of the V&A Dundee using her Nikon D750. We were drawn to it by the strong lines and the blue tones.
Linda Wride
Linda has had two of her images shortlisted for the February 2022 round of our competition. She shot this image, ‘Light on Red’, with her D750 and Nikkor 24-120mm lens. It reminds me of a ‘dazzle ship’, but it’s bricks and mortar.
Linda’s second shortlisted image, ‘The Red Wall’ makes great use of graphic shapes and bold colours to really full-fill the brief.
Fiona Beadle
Fiona’s image, ‘Kaleidoscope Beach Huts’ packs a colourful punch! She captured it using her Nikon Z50 and Nikkor 16-55mm lens. She says, ‘I love the mouth-watering colours of these beautiful beach huts. They were so bright in the winter sun, I was drawn closer to them and peeked through. It looked like a kaleidoscope. I cropped the image to a square format to intensify the effect.’
Amanda Burgess
Amanda captured ‘Kid on a Bike’ Sony A7 III with a Sony 24-105mm lens. The image shows Amanda’s perfect timing and excellent shutter speed selection which has delivered just the right degree of blur in the moving subject while still keeping the wall sharp.
Jo Bird
Jo used her Sony A7R II to capture this image, ‘Diamonds and Squares’, of a building in London. We love the careful composition and use of black and white photography to bring out the diamond shapes.
Carmen Drake
Carmen says that she saw this detail of a carpark in Canary Wharf and was immediately attracted by its pattern of lines and circles. She shot it with her Fujifilm GFX 50S.
Claudio Sericano
We love Claudio’s graphic ‘Skyscraper’ image captured with a Canon EOS 600D. His monochrome conversion works extremely well while his long exposure has recorded some movement in the sky to inject even more interest.
Sonya Rogers
Sonya tells us that this cheerful apartment block lies in the City of London, surrounded by Wren churches and super-modern architecture. It made her happy looking at it! She photographed it using her Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III.
CJPOTY February 2022 winner: Fiona Beadle
Congratulations Fiona, a voucher to the value of £500 from MPB is heading your way! Let us know what you spend it on. Your image will also join the other nine in our shortlist to be judged for the overall prize at the end of the year.
CJPOTY March 2022: ‘Spring Colour’
Colourful spring flowers and blossom are a welcome sight every year, but particularly so in recent times. We don’t mind if you shoot them close-up or use a wide-angle lens to put them in the context of the landscape, just make sure that spring flowers are a key element of your image. And don’t worry, we’re calling white a colour so images of snowdrops count as spring colour!
This round of our monthly competition is open for submissions until 18:00 GMT (19:00 CET and 10:00 PST) on 31st March 2022.
To submit your entry, visit cjpoty.com. You can submit one image per entry but make up to three entries for £2.00 plus payment processing costs (£0.26).
Spring colour inspiration and shooting tips
After the gloom of winter, spring flowers are usually enough to inspire any photographer to pick up their camera, but they are challenging subjects. Firstly, unless you’re shooting blossom in the trees, you’ll usually have to get down low. And even in light wind, they can bob around infuriatingly, making getting the focus and composition just right quite tricky. But that’s part of the fun.
We have a few post that might help with both inspiration and shooting tips. First up, we have 4 ways to add instant impact to spring images, next we have 11 quick spring photography tips and finally we have , how to photograph bluebells. It’s a little early in the season for bluebells, but if we’re lucky some of the shoots that are appearing in the UK now may produce a few flowers in the sunnier patches of woodland before the end of the month, and of course, many of the tips can be applied to photographing other flowers. Or perhaps you got a great shot of bluebells from last spring? Submitted images don’t have to been taken this year – or in the UK.
Camera Jabber Photographer of the Year prizes
At the end of the month, the Camera Jabber team will pick one winning image and nine runners up from the March entries. The photographer of the winning image will receive a voucher from MPB.com to the value of £500 which can be spent on anything from a huge range of kit from the World’s biggest platform for used photographic gear.
All 10 of the selected images will go into our shortlist for the year.
We’ll do this each month in 2022 so that by the end of the year, there will be 120 shortlisted images. These will then go before our fantastic panel of judges who will decide the 1st, 2nd and 3rd-placed images.
The photographer of the first-placed image overall, as decided by the panel of judges, will received a voucher to the value of £1000 from MPB.com as well as a trophy and the title ‘Camera Jabber Photographer of the Year 2023‘. The photographers who come second and third will receive vouchers worth £500 and £250 respectively.
The judges are:
Ben Brain – Photographer, journalist & Sigma ambassador
Sophie Collins – Chief Marketing Office at MPB
Donna Crous – Food photographer, author, Nikon Europe ambassador and Rotolight Master of Light
Kate Hopewell-Smith – Wedding, portrait & boudoir photographer, Sony ambassador
Sanjay Jogia – Wedding photographer & Canon ambassador
Pete Reed OBE – Three times Olympic gold medal-winning rower and keen documentary photographer
Dominique Shaw – Photographer and co-founder of York Place Studios and Fujifilm ambassador
Craig Strong – Lensbaby founder
Christina Vaughan – Founder of Cultura Creative, the home of inclusive stock photography
Jeremy Walker – Landscape photographer, author & former Nikon ambassador
You don’t have to enter the competition every month, but you are welcome to do so and the more shortlisted images you have at the end of the year, the greater than chance of winning the top prize.
About MPB
Founded by Matt Barker in 2011, MPB is the world’s largest platform for used photography and videography kit. MPB has transformed the way people buy, sell and trade equipment, making photography more accessible, affordable and sustainable.
Headquartered in the creative communities of Brighton, Brooklyn and Berlin, the MPB team includes trained camera experts and seasoned photographers and videographers who bring their passion to work every day to deliver outstanding service. Every piece of kit is inspected carefully by product specialists and comes with a six-month warranty to give customers peace of mind that buying used doesn’t mean sacrificing reliability.