Prefer to listen? There’s an audio player at the bottom of the post.
Unfortunately, before recording this episode, I didn’t notice that the third and second place had the same number of votes, meaning they were both actually joint second place. Sorry about that Craig!
These images were voted the best of the bunch from the May ’09 MBP Assignment on the theme “Nothing in Focus”. You can see all of the images entered in the Assignment gallery in the MBP Members’ Galleries Web site.
Joint Second Place:

"A Blurred" by Craig Halp
Joint Second Place:

"I finally found my reading glasses!" by Milt Lyerly
First Place:

"Tibetan Monk creating Long Life Buddha Sand Mandala" by Paul Davis
All Images © Copyright of contributing members
First Half of 2009 Grand Prize!
Remember that this assignment was the last assignment for the first half of 2009, which we’ll be grouping together for the first accumulate vote prize. The prize for this first half of the year is a cheeky rain-check prize. I’m working on a project to product small fine art print folios, that I’m hoping to make available in the next few months, and the winner of this first accumulated vote assignment will receive edition #1 of that first folio once it’s available.
And now that the votes are in, I am able to congratulate Forrest Tanaka for amassing over 100 votes in the five assignments that make up this first batch of 2009. Forrest is hqsbud in the MBP Forums. He always puts so much into the Assignment, and it really shows. Forrest won the Lowepro bag when we were sponsored by Lowepro too. You’re certainly doing everything right Forrest, so please accept my rain-check prize, and I’ll be in touch in the coming months to make sure that your postal address hasn’t changed.
With that, we start a new series of six monthly assignments from the one currently in progress for June, until the end of November, and the prizes for this have been made possible by our sponsors WebSpy. There’s a blog post with details of the prizes, but to quickly recap, the third place winner will receive every issue of LensWork Extended up until December this year, when the prize winners will be decided. That’s 29 issues of LensWork extended, which is an incredible prize. Thanks to the kind folks at LensWork for arranging such a great prize for us. The second place winner will receive a Lensbaby Composer. Again, this is just amazing, and will open many creative doors for the winner. The first place winner will receive an incredible Sigma 50mm F1.4 EX DG HSM Lens! If the winner already has this lens or simply does not want it, you can exchange it for a $500 B&H gift voucher. How cool is that!?
So, if you haven’t already, please do get out and start shooting for the June assignment, on the theme of Everything in Focus.
Assignment Rules and Guidelines
You can see the votes for this assignment and accumulated votes to date here: http://www.martinbaileyphotography.com/scores2009.php
You can see all the images entered for the Nothing in Focus Assignment here: http://www.mbpgalleries.com/thumbnails.php?album=800
Here are the details of the photography assignment prizes that WebSpy has kindly sponsored too: http://blog.martinbaileyphotography.com/2009/06/09/competition-prizes/
This episode is sponsored by WebSpy, the Internet Monitoring, Analysis & Reporting Specialists.
The music in this Podcast was created and produced by UniqueTracks.
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Congratulations to the winners! These are beautiful images. This was a tough assignment to get an image that looked like it was meant to be intentionally not sharp. I tried several different things: filters, manually unfocusing the image in camera, zooming the lens, etc. I think the best results for me were from a long exposure. I did have one image that I almost submitted that was a “happy accident”, but part of it was too sharp.
I had a lot of fund shooting for this assignment too. It’s great to get us thinking about stuff that we might not try otherwise.