World's largest photography contest comes to the UK!
September is the month when summer begins drawing to a close, the football season is in full swing and the leaves begin to change colour. You may not be aware that it's also the month of the world's largest photography competition.
Wiki Loves Monuments is a global competition, open to everyone. In the UK the aim is to gather together freely-licensed high quality photographs of the UK's listed buildings for use on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. And it's open to everybody.
Wikipedia has a global audience of over 500 million people every month, making Wiki Loves Monuments a chance for entrants to have their photography potentially reach a very large audience. For example, the article about Hadrian's Wall receives around 700,000 visitors a year while the article about London is viewed around 4.5 million times a year.
Aside from being great fun, Wiki Loves Monuments is a way of capturing a snapshot of our nation’s cultural heritage for future generations, documenting our country’s most important historic buildings. Over time, the collections gathered throughout the competition will become an incredibly useful historical resource.
Entries can be images taken specially for the competition, or can be pre-existing images.
Michael Maggs, volunteer member of the Wiki Loves Monuments UK steering committee and a Wikimedia UK Trustee, said: “The contest is a great way not only to contribute to Wikipedia but also to record and share with the world images of your local historic environment. You don't need to be a professional-quality photographer to upload photos and help make a difference.”
Jon Davies, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, the charity that is helping to support the initiative, said: "Taking part in Wiki Loves Monuments for the first time is very exciting. We’re hoping that the UK will provide a leading contribution to the contest and are calling on photographers, amateur and professional alike, to help to make this happen. We'd love for the global winner to come from the UK."
To learn more about the competition and to get involved, visit www.wikilovesmonuments.org.uk
1 comment:
It's pretty good fun getting involved in this. It's got me to visit quite interesting buildings that I had literally walked past every day for years and never gone inside.
On the other hand I had to get a shot of one building that due to the surroundings meant that I had to lay on a path, camera tucked under my chin, taking photos with gut sucked in so it didn't get in the shot!
http://thoggy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/wiki-loves-monuments-uk-competition.html
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