Photo of the Month

Photo of the Month | 2nd Month | 1st Place

The Worshippers, by Waseef Akhtar
Waseef Akhtar is a freelance photographer based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. On June 28, 2010, his photograph, “The Worshippers” was awarded in the Photo of the Day contest, as it scored a solid 53 (Value 9, Clarity 9, Composition 18, Style 9, and Skill 8 ) from our judge. (http://bit.ly/ckUbYu+) The number of viewers boosted the popularity of the photograph, raising its score to 66.04, the highest score in this competition. It is the winner of Photograph of the Month – 2nd Month, 1st Place.

Photographer Waseef Akhtar, with his photograph “The Worshippers”, took us to the most sacred place on Earth, Mecca, to Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām (The Sacred Mosque). Here prophet Abraham(Ibrahim) and his son Ismail (Ishmeal) built the Ka’bah. This task was assigned to Abraham(pbuh) by Allah(SWT). Ka’bah is the direction of prayer for the followers of peace. Only those people who submit their will to Almighty can enter into this scared city.

Millions of people around the world visit Masjid Al-Haram every day, which is unknown to many because it is concealed by the controlled media in different parts of the world. On month of Ramadan and during Hajj this number increases to more than 2.5 million a day. “The Worshippers” portrays a small part of it, as the current maximum capacity of the Mosque is 800,000 inside, and 1,120,000 outside.

The next nearest contestant was Aarthi Ramamurthy, with her photograph “Swirl”, which scored 65.97.

We verified these scores a couple of times and decided to award both the photographs for Photo of the Month – July.

Swirl by Aarthi Ramamurthy

Aarthi Ramamurthy, an amateur photographer, originally from Chennai, India, currently lives in Seattle, WA. She became our Photographer with Style, with photographer Waseef Akhtar.

Aarthi took “Swirl” in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her photograph shows the ceiling of one of the hotels in an abstract way. Clarity of this image, as well as the light and simple composition, gave it a score of 51 out of 60 from our judge (Value 9, Clarity 10, Composition 17, Style 7, and skill 8).

Besides its colorful abstract theme, this photograph drew attention of 344 visitors at the time when we were judging Photo of the Month – 2nd Month Award. This number of visitors is higher than any other photographs in our competition received.

With a score of 65.97 in total, this photograph gave us the opportunity to do an interview with Aarthi, which will be published in Light and Composition Volume 2, A Whole New Journey.

Prize: Photographs will be published in 2nd & 3rd pages in the magazine plus special interviews of Waseef & Aarthi in our magazine in the “Photographer with Style” section.

Photo of the Month | 2nd Month | 2nd Place

Puerto Anchorena by Sérgio Veludo

There were other 3 close contestants who scored more than 60 too. Our team decided to honor those as 2nd and 3rd places with a page in next issue, where they will share the stories of these photographs. From our side, we always try our best to make this contest as transparent as possible. We have uploaded the Contest Analysis in PDF. Please download it and take a look. And don’t forget to participate in next month’s contest.