Photo Scavenger Challenge

This past September Kiki emailed me and asked whether I would be interested in participating in a photography scavenger hunt.  Of course I said yes. I'm always up for a challenge, especially when they involve photography.

Kiki and I did not take it too seriously and viewed it more like an amusing thing to do.  It turned out to be a lot of fun.  I would definitely participate in another one, even though we weren't given a lot of time to take the photos.  We received the instructions on a Thursday evening and had until the following Saturday afternoon to present the photographs.  I only had Friday evening and Saturday morning to take the photos.  We had a third participant in our group.  This was the list of photographs that we had to present.

1. *Unconventional Panorama Shot *

2. *Fleeting Macro Photo *

3. *Political Architectural Shot *

4. *Comical Animal Shot*

5. *Volatile Action Shot *

6. *Intense Emotion*

7. *Unintentional Model Shot*

8. *Obsolete Transportation Shot *

9. *PhotoScav Team Shot *

10. *GPS Landmark (each team will be given a different coordinate) 

I did numbers 1, 4, 5, 6, 8 and Kiki did 2, 3, 9 and 10.  One of my favourites was Kiki's political architecture shot.  It was a house of cards with pictures of Toronto mayoral candidates glued on the face of the cards.  I was even more impressed that she took the time to create the house of cards without cheating - I would have just used glue to keep the cards in place.  The official judges of the contest said that our photos were the most creative of all the teams and my Barbie photo below was their favourite!  We ended up being the judges favourite team and came in second place overall (there was a public vote as well as the official judges vote).  Below are four of my photographs for this challenge.

I took the unconventional panorama shot last and was cutting it fairly close to the time I had to print my photos.  I spent a few hours experimenting with a few ideas and finally ended up with the "Barbie" shot below.  In this photograph, the body is from a Barbie I received this year when someone was giving it away and the head is from a Bratz doll (I think it belonged to my niece).  I tore the Barbie head off and used a Bratz head because I found it a lot more interesting.  The black background is not a part of the photograph.  A few people asked me at the event whether I photoshopped the photograph, but I didn't.  It was also taken in a single shot.

I enlisted my friend Minty Ninja to help me with the obsolete transportation shot.  I originally wanted to use balloons, but given the timing (Friday evening), I couldn't find any shops with helium open (there was one, but it was closed by the time I got there).  I was quite disappointed about that. Instead, I used my second option, umbrellas (I love umbrellas).  I probably should have used a brighter umbrella, but didn't have one with me at the time.  It was extremely windy that day and by the time we did the shoot, it was getting quite dark out.  I thought MN was literally going to blow away with the umbrella.  I want to do the shoot again, but with colour balloons and in daylight.  

I took the fire shot below for the volatile action shot after Kiki called me about a big fire at the corner of Church and Parliament that Friday.  I didn't have a zoom lens with me for this shot and this was as close as I could get to the fire.  It was a crazy fire that took up the entire apartment.  Several dozen people were lined up outside watching the fire, eating dinner, chatting with friends and like me taking photographs.

The shot below was for intense emotion.  As I was taking photos of the fire, I overheard a girl on the phone to her dad.  She was balling really loudly.  From snippets of what I heard, apparently she knew someone who lived in the apartment.  I kind of felt like a photojournalist taking these fire-related shots.