Until I started The Daily Artisan business and blog, I had zero experience with social media, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning it over these past five months.
There’s still so much more to learn and know, but I’m getting there slowly but surely. And, this week I entered my first-ever photography challenge on Instagram through a feature hub.
With a theme of black and purple, the competition allowed you to enter as many of your photographs as you wished. Four winning photos were announced yesterday – and spoiler alert here – the four I entered unfortunately were not among them!
Despite not winning, I had a wonderful time planning my black and purple content, assembling needed props, taking literally hundreds of shots over a week’s time – and then making review categories of ones designated “for consideration,” “semi-finalists,” and “finalists,” until I selected the four photographs to submit (with input from my awesome nephew “assistant!”).
My Choice was (Purple) Vegetables
I would say 99.9% of the 162 photography submissions were of flowers, and there were stunning ones in the contest. Let me mention here that I’ve been really impressed with the talent and beautiful work of so many photographers on Instagram – truly awesome. Congratulations to the four photographers with the winning black and purple shots!
Instead of flowers (which wasn’t a requirement), I decided to go with purple vegetables with a black backdrop and arranged on top of a black, reflective surface. I roamed grocery store aisles as I’m known to do, and on various trips purchased a purple cauliflower, purple grapes, purple artichoke, purple eggplant, and purple cabbage.
My goal was to make the vegetables look artistically styled in a clean, minimalist way, and the drama of black (and also the reflective surface) helped with this. The eggplant and grapes were most challenging to shoot due to their smooth, shiny surfaces and lack of different color tones for dimension but all five purple vegetables I bought made it into at least one of my submitted photographs.
Future Competitions
Definitely I plan to enter more Instagram photography competitions like this one! It’s a great way to work at getting better at your craft and also just a lot of fun. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll get to use the word “win” in a blog post title for The Daily Artisan!
Enjoy the photographs – the four I submitted are provided in full-size below, followed by some others I deemed “runners-up” in my culling.
And be sure to catch the next-to-last photograph – who says photography subjects (even a pretty artichoke) can’t have a clumsy day on the set!
My Four Submissions for the Black and Purple Competition:
Others I Shot (including of Miss “Graceful” Artichoke!):
Be sure to follow The Daily Artisan on Facebook and Instagram @thedailyartisan, and check out The Daily Artisan online store for note cards of my photographs!
