Some of you may remember around this time last year I decided to bolster the bank balance by entering a few photo competitions with a view to winning a truckload of COLD HARD CASH.
In fact, so confident was I of taking out first prize I went ahead and titled one of blog posts “How I made $20,000 in 24 hours”. To be honest, I also used this title as link bait to see how much traffic I could drive to the blog; for some reason it seems people are more interested in making fast cash than they are in seeing photos of our native flora and fauna (this time round I’m trying to find out if peopple are interested in free iPads). This ended up being my 2nd most popular non-wedding post of 2010 and garnered almost triple the hits of the very next post titled “Kangaroos, Plants and Whales” (which IMO is pretty damn exciting in it’s own right – come on people, Kangaroos AND whales?!?).
The competition I was taking part in was the Art of Nature, an initiative of the state government to get people to enjoy our state’s many and varied national parks. Before I took my first photo I knew realistically my chances of success were slim, photo competitions are always a bit of a crap shoot, and one that attracts thousands of entries is always going to be hard to win. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out of the house on a winter weekend, go for some bush walks, try to find some kangaroos, visit a National Park I’d not been to before. And I did all those things, I ended up visiting 3 Nationals Parks, from Waitpinga in the South, to a little park near the Barossa then all the way over to Innes on the Yorke Peninsula and it was fantastic. I was out there making photos and getting exercise when I otherwise would have been planted in front of the TV with a beer in one hand and packet of chips in the other.
Imagine my delight then when I checked my inbox this morning to find details of the 2011 Art of Nature Competition. The email was titled “2011 Art of Nature T-shirt Design Competition is now open” and my first thought was wow, they’re going all out this year, building excitement for the photo competition by preceding it with a T-shirt design competition. It wasn’t until I checked out the website that the penny dropped and my heart sunk. The T-Shirt design was the competition. No photos required.
How on earth is a T-shirt design going to get more people to visit National Parks? A photo competition requires the entrant to visit a park (or parks) in order to create their submission(s); they would often take family and friends along and make a day of it. By contrast a T-shirt design requires the entrant to sit in front of a computer for a few hours and not leave the house. Actually visiting a National Park would get in the way of their computer based T-shirt design. I just don’t get it. I also think it would have to be a pretty spectacular T-shirt to motivate people to get off the couch and get back to nature. The font would have to be exceptional. Photographs on the other hand instantly connect with people and motivate them to action. If I see a photo of a breathtakingly beautiful landscape that’s only an hour or two from my house then I might be motivated to go and find it one day – if I see someone wearing a T-shirt that says Art of Nature then I’m probably going to head to the shops for some chips and beer and put the couch on notice.
In case you missed it last year here’s a few photos that won’t be taken this time round.
PS – There are actually 3 ipads up for grabs in this T-shirt competition so my title wasn’t totally misleading.
