Shoot & Share Photo Contest | 2020 Results

If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember reading a post last spring, a post the spring before, a post the spring before, a post the spring before, & one the spring before that about me entering the Shoot & Share Photo Contest for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th & 6th years in a row.

Well, this year was year #7 for me entering – wow. It’s crazy that this contest has been going on so long! It seems like just yesterday that I heard about it & decided, on a whim, to enter a few images!

Here’s the deal though: I honestly almost did not share about the Shoot & Share Photo Contest this year. And there are two reasons for that:

My images didn’t do as well this year as they have in the past.
This year might have been the very last year for the Shoot & Share Contest – the future of the contest is very unknown.

I’ll explain a little further:

Over the past few years, I’ve had images place in the top 30%, top 20%, and top 10%. The top 30% may not sound super prestigious, but when you take into consideration that on average, over 500,000 images are entered into this contest, it truly is something to be proud of!

Every year, the number of images I’ve had place in the top 30% has grown – in 2019, 13 of my images landed in the top 30%! This year though, I only had 5 images make it into the top 30%. So, that’s a bit depressing.

On top of all of that though, the Shoot & Share team (the people who actually run the contest) ran it a bit “differently” this year. For starters, the Contest started way later than usual. The Contest is always in February & this year, it didn’t start until the end of May. But, how can we complain? This Contest is 100% free & run by mostly volunteers, so if they decide to move it’s dates around, that’s fine. (It just specifically had photographers upset this year because we were all in “quarantine” while we traditionally should have been voting – during the month of March.)

Further, once the team officially announced the Contest, the guidelines & the dates that submissions would be open – in what appeared to be an attempt to “pad” their numbers, they decided to do away with all of their original dates & deadlines & extend everything way out – at the last minute pushing the submission deadline out an additional 10 more days.

This always happens – the submission deadline arrives & they give procrastinating photographers an additional 48 hours to get their photos submitted (it’s not like the submission window is short – it’s typically 2-3 weeks long.) But, this year, after giving everyone that 2-day grace period, they extended the grace period again by another very long 7 days. This had everyone quite upset – we’d already awaited for the Contest an additional 3 months & because the submission numbers weren’t quite as high as they wanted, they just decided to leave the window open for so much longer? It was upsetting for people, like myself, who followed the rules, got our images together within the initial submission period, and were waiting to vote. (Can you hear my Enneagram 1 coming thru?)

But, those two points are pretty minor compared to how the entire Shoot & Share community melted down toward the end of the Contest. Without going into too much detail (because it gets a bit complicated) – there is a very large Shoot & Share Facebook Group where updates about the Contest are posted & during the last round of the Contest (and after the Contest closed & the final votes were being tallied) things got very political. The group (which once boasted almost 60,000 members) got very nasty with members fighting with one another & the people who run the Contest. Not only were members fighting over current events that were hot topics in the news, but old dirt was dug up about people who used to help run the Contest & private issues suddenly became very pubic.

It was terrible, & very ugly, & so upsetting. The community split & thousands of members left the Facebook group (what used to be a group of almost 60k, now only has about 28k members left). And people didn’t just leave the Facebook group – they pulled their images from the Contest as well & deleted their Shoot & Share accounts. Which of course, got even stickier since the Contest was still finishing up & no results had been announced yet.

Needless to say, the future of the Shoot & Share Photo Contest is completely uncertain. For a Contest that had been growing by leaps & bounds every single year to go thru so much turmoil – I’m just not sure if it could survive the trauma of what happened this year.

So, all things considered: I honestly contemplated not even sharing about the Shoot & Share Photo Contest this year. But in the end, I decided that I would – sure, my images didn’t do as well as they have in the past (in fact, my images did downright horrible this year – I haven’t had this few images place in the top 30% since 2015 – how’s that for a kick in the pants?)

But even though I personally did not do very well this year, I still wanted to post about the Contest as a sign of my support.

Sure, the people who run the Shoot & Share Photo Contest did not handle the ugly situation that arose a few weeks ago as well as they could have. Hindsight is 20/20 & looking back, things most definitely should have been handled differently. But, in the moment, I believe they did the best they could. I still stand by & support the Shoot & Share community for what they’ve done & accomplished thru the years and for the help they’ve been to me & my business.

So, here are my images that placed in the top 30% of the contest – there might only be 5 (and last year I had 13), but I’m still super proud of these photos! (I guess I can really shoot a good ring shot, eh? IF there is a Contest next year, maybe I’ll just submit 50 ring shots.) I guess we’ll just have to wait & see if there is a “next” year or not!

Place: 638 out of 13,385 | Top 10% | Wedding Details Category