U.K. cellular operator Orange sponsors camera phone photo contest

Thanks to Marc Hopwood, who sent me this information three weeks ago (sorry, surgery interferred with posting!), I learned that U.K. cellular operator Orange is sponsoring a photo contest for camera phone users. The contest, Expressionist, wants photos of different expressions: Happy, surprised, angry, smug, bored, sad, guilty, scared, confused.

The contest ends January 16, 2004. Prizes include five Panasonic X70 camera phones, "a mood altering Red Letter Day experience" for winners of the top photo in each category of expressions and a trip to London for the top three winners to view a camera phone photo exhibition (see below).

Interactive video mural

The exhibition will be held in a London art gallery where the photos will comprise an "interactive" video mural. According to Orange, "Orange Expressionist is a unique interactive video mural -- an installation in a London gallery conceived to project a range of human emotions onto the walls at your prompt.

"You stare at the wall. The wall stares back. You smile at the wall. A thousand faces smile back. You pull the face -- be it happy, sad or confused -- and you control the show."

The contest is, obviously, a great way for Orange to promote camera phones and to encourage creativity. Although I hate the typically fuzzy photos of VGA camera phones, I've got to admit that creative people can get pretty good photos from even today's camera phones (I'm not including the one megapixel handsets in Asia).

Marketing camera phone creativity

Take a look at the article I wrote about Sony Ericsson's t-six-ten online photo magazine and ongoing contest if you want to see some good photos.

Also, keep watch of SENT, the camera phone photo exhibit that will be held in Los Angeles next month, as I previously wrote. SENT has some interesting celebrity entrants, such as Will Wheaton (of Star Trek Next Generation fame) and Weird Al Yankovic.

Since VGA camera phones typically produce rather crummy photos (certainly compared to even a one megapixel digital camera), you have to be a lot more creative and talented to snap interesting shots. In another few years, when two megapixel camera phones will be more common, photo resolution won't be a major issue.

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[mikepop]

see also:

http://aiyaa.filterfine.net/

May Woo's cameraphone face expression experiment that she started in June 03