Winners of #2014 Photo-a-Day Instagram Challenge announced

We challenged current TCC students to share what they saw on campus with 28 daily themes and a single hashtag: #TCCphotoaday.  The prize? StormDollars credit to use at campus cafes, coffee shops, bookstores and vending machines.

Four weekly, random drawing winners Sam Jenkins, Necole Browling, Hannah Supan and Hannah Zach, won $20 StormDollars credit each for their photos.

Three overall grand prize “Best in Show” winners were judged and awarded by Tom Siegmund, a professor of the arts at the Visual Arts Center in Portsmouth.

With 20 years of experience at the VAC, Siegmund teaches photography, including electronic darkroom, introduction to photography and advanced portfolio resume classes.

Siegmund was impressed with the breadth of entries and their subject matter:  “The diversity was wonderful,” he said. “The landscapes are great. Among the photos we see abstracts and traditional composition. Many of them are beautifully manipulated using Instagram’s filters.”

Siegmund was also able to distill a common thread from the collection. “The photos are all kind of surreal,” he said. “Our students are obviously a very dreamy bunch.”

Check out the winners – and his feedback below. You can view all the entries at web.tcc.edu/social/february-2014-photo-a-day-contest.php.
 

1st Place ($50 StormDollars) – Tomomi Watkins

“This architectural image is well composed, rich with detail and a simple color palette. The umbrellas serve as a nice focal point, and the reflection adds a very nice texture to the foreground area — a beautiful building [the new Virginia Beach Student Center] in a beautiful setting.  Nicely done!”

2nd Place ($40 StormDollars) – Deanna Zielinski

“Inside and outside, somewhere between architectural and landscape at the Joint-Use Library. I really enjoyed the contrast in color; the warmth of the foreground shape (the table) contrasted by the cool outside view. The way perspective is rendered is also exciting, in that we get very close and far away in the same space. I was attracted to the shape of things, form and space.”

3rd Place ($30 StormDollars) –
Caitlin Price

“A simple landscape that includes a silhouette of buildings and a tree line with a beautifully rendered sky, rich with color and texture. The composition is well balanced; the thin silhouette sets up a nice base for the sky to rest on.”

Honorable Mention – Carlie Kinsey

“We look at photographs for a lot of reasons. They tell us something – big or small, they make us remember something, and the list goes on. I enjoyed the simplicity of this image; the scale and space the box of raisins occupies and the overall warmth of the image. I took special notice to the text on the lid. Maybe I am supposed to meditate on this message. Maybe the image was totally random. The beauty of photography is I can make this image be about whatever I want it to be. I like the soft polka dots in the background.”

Want to participate in our next social media contest? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter (@TCCVa), and Instagram (@TCCVA) to stay in the know and submit your own beautiful photos from campus! (web.tcc.edu/social)