The first contest period has ended now, September 1st 2009 and three winners have been declared. These members will soon be contacted by Lenzr admin re:  delivery of prizes, testimonials, and perhaps even candid self portraits. It was a very successful launch and there were so many photos uploaded to the index we wondered about adopting some kind of photo Inventory Software to keep track of all the submissions in all different categories, and indeed this might be something we consider licensing in the future. In the meantime,

Best Toronto Skyline had 46 photos submitted, including some amazing shots with lightning and ducks and vintage shots of the skyline that have all together gathered up over 2500 votes.

The first contest was sponsored by Lenzr.com and brought a lot of attention to the site. The prize is a Pentax Optio P90 digital camera.

The winner is DuCourt, who describes himself in the third person in his Lenzr.com profile, “Thomas is a long-standing freelance film technician in the Toronto film industry who is attempting to transition into an on-set photographer”. That could explain the wide aspect ratio here. There was certainly room for more details, objects and nouns contained in a Storage Ottawa solution, especially for the contest winners who become burdened with fame.

The photo entitled Looking back is a wonderful panorama shot of the city and bears the Caption ‘I took this photo looking back from one of my favorite Toronto hang-outs – THE DOCKS driving range down on Cherry St.’ This photo won the prize with 107 green thumbs up.

Summer in Toronto had people snapping and submitting shots of anything and everything outdoors in Toronto . The rules were fast and loose to encourage mass participation.  This was the most successful contest with 58 pictures uploaded and over 3700 votes.

This contest was sponsored by myCELLmyTERMS and offers as reward one smart phone.

The winner is Snickerzmom, whose bio reads,  ‘just me, a great BF and three cats’.  She wins the grand prize with a picture of a man (her father?) at the Blue Jays game.

Dad at the Game had 112 green thumbs up and the caption may have contributed to the success of this image. Caption “This is one of my favourite pictures of my Dad. For me, enjoying the game with my Dad is one of the best things about TO. It’s our time!”

Stay tuned for more details on Snickerzmom meeting representatives of myCELLmyTERMS to declare her choice and receive the grand prize.

Which phone will she choose?
Emergency in Toronto had 15 photos and gathered over 300 total votes.

The contest was sponsored by Bristall Morgan and offers an Esquire Verve 2020 luxury watch as reward.

The winner is mpirra.  This photographer’s bio reads, ‘I have been an amateur photographer for the past 30 years. Would like to go pro one day‘.

The winning photo,  entitled Firefighter saving lives carries the helpful Caption “Toronto Firefighter returning from a fire”.  This image won the contest with 55 green thumbs up.

Emergency in Toronto event was the most rigidly thematic of Lenzr contest cycle #1. The web challenge tasked users to upload images of Toronto’s frontline emergency respeonse workers in action and because of the stern criteria it received the fewest votes, but perhaps the most attention. Some of our favourite photos have been uploaded here

This amazing woman is the Contest Queen, a very active contest participant and promoter with over twenty years experience and wisdom to share. She’s also a prolific author and thinker and a very informative and entertaining blogger.  Add it all up and Carolyn is a profoundly original web marketer that would probably like to be considered North America’s Contest Queen, and indeed that’s exactly what she’s becoming…

You can read all about Carolyn Wilman, the Contest Queen on Canada Blog Friends which has just recently profiled her and published her vision of the future. The author has once again gone to great lengths to get all the subject URLS in order, and link to all platforms and properties in Carolyn’s royal realm.

Buy her book You Can’t Win If You Don’t Enter to read all her secrets.

Lenzr.com is almost sixty days old, and now has 73 members that have uploaded 114 original photos which have collectively amassed 6000 votes.  So far only one user has been banned from the website, and only four photos have been removed by Admin from the listings.

Here’s a glance at the Google Analytics dashboard for the entire first contest period. The spikes correspond to marketing initiatives by partners on various affiliated platforms. Participation is growing as Lenzr.com discovers new markets for contest data and streamlines the information distribution processes.

Hooray!  This is reason enough to cheer. I’ve seen other contests with twice the budget do half those numbers. And I want to give a shout out to those photographers who uploaded some really creative shots (like mighty shrimp’s picture of the 2008 Queen St Fire (below) and the lady who gave up the pictures of Cherry beach and Toronto Harbourfront. The high level of creativity is another big reason to cheer…Yay!

Summer in Toronto is the most successful contest with 56 pictures submissions and 3594 votes.  Highlights here include pictures of a man and dog eating ice cream, a Toronto Blue Jays fan, and a little boy in a splash pond.

Best Toronto Skyline has 44 photos submissions, including some amazing shots with lightning and ducks and vintage shots of the skyline, that have together gathered a total of  2390 votes.

Emergency in Toronto had 14 photos and 269 total votes – this was the hardest challenge and yet our favourite of the bunch. Photos like the one below (credit to mighty shrimp) are perfect as make Lenzr.com a worthwhile social political and historically culturally relevant destination.  In otherwords these shots make Lenzr cool.

Stay tuned for information on contest winners. These three contests end August 31st 2009. The Winners are the members who uploaded the most popular photos in each contest, as determined by the number of green thumbs up votes. And I should mention that the red ‘thumbs down’ vote does nothing, just so you know. Yes that’s what we’re changing…

UPCOMING CHANGES:
It’s no secret the voting mechanism is flawed – its too simple and inspires user manipulation. There’ll will be a multitude of minor changes coming in Contest Period #2 (the next round of contests will commence September 1st and conclude on October 31st 2009) The very first thing to be changed is the voting mechanism, alterations are also being made to the user registration process.

REGISTRATION:
Upcoming changes will force all current users to re register their usernames and profile information and check boxes to accept or deny coupons from sponsors, and other options.

LENZR WIDGET ADOPTERS
Have a look at DebLewis.ca and check out the 100x vertical sidebar widget on the lower half of the template.

Lenzr was built to help photographers gain attention in online media and get professional work by providing an easy,  fun to use platform that showcases great pictures.

Registered members have the option of listing their web URL in their profile and it really makes us happy when we see users taking advantage of this feature.  A link is a link, and successful artists and photographers have hundreds of them.  This little piece of social capital belongs to the photographers that use the site and that’s another curious biproduct of this cute little photo contest construct.

As we evolve Lenzr’s brand of premium online entertainment, we’ll no doubt make some friends along the way.

This is the best photo competition index website that we’ve ever seen;  our experts are indeed surprised at how much information these developers and administrators (and data entry interns) have thus far squeezed into this portal.  Seriously there must be over five hundred contests on there now, and almost all of them are free.

Photo Contest Rituals

This website boasts that a new photo contest is added everyday, and that’s exactly what serial web contest participants need to hear to plan and execute their daily entries, or atleast make bi-weekly visits.  That’s another winning strategy at work here.

Coincidently, we find it interesting to note that almost none of the contests listed on the afformentioned web index  are judged by the website’s own membership;  so we recognize now that this is something that makes Lenzr unique, (even if it is fraught with click fraud and abuse by iPhone users and their duplicitous friends* ).

RELAX devotees. *There are some serious changes coming down the pipe for the next round of contests on Lenzr, and that includes the scoring system. We’re confident, you’re going to like it.

Lenzr.com is just starting to get its web legs, and now there are widgets available for blog users. This is great way to join the Lenzr community and become part of a synergistic art movement. Check out the widgets here.

This bean sprout website germ-of-an-idea manifest online has just pushed its head up above the night soil.

In the summer of 2009, this junior contest website is starting to get some attention, and twenty one days after launch their were over 100 registered users, 120 different photos and almost 5000 total votes. There are now unusual alliances forming and new production rituals appearing as knowledge is gathered on all eleven sides of this uncut diamond.

THE BLOG WIDGETS

The Lenzr Blog Widget is now available in three basic layouts (vertical 100x or 200x or horizontal 300x) for all bloggers that want to get more involved in Lenzr’s creative community; the bean stalk is just beginning to stretch out its hairy tentacles.

The Lenzr Blog Widget cycles through all three contests, showing the top three most popular images in each match, one contest at a time – each event gets two seconds with a half second fade. Should it be longer? NOTE: The blog widget that’s currently available is just the beginning of what’s possible. Today there’s only two layouts, vertical and horizontal, but tomorrow there will be many more customizable features. For example, right now the script is programmed to load the most popular images, the three most thumbed up pictures in each contest. The mechanism ignores the thumbs down quotient and that could be changed – the feed could someday select and display the worst, most unpopular images. Or maybe it could be programmed to show only the images that member has uploaded? Or perhaps only the images they like?

How I met Steven Prentice is a funny story. I was watching CHCH news television in the morning while checking my emails and he made an appearance on behalf of Bristall Morgan. He was on there talking about the power of networking and harnessing humans on social networks and I took exception to one of his remarks.  So of course,  I visited his website and subsequently left a vitriolic comment on his blog.

Mr. Prentice did not erase my angry words. But rather he answered my concerns with the perfect tone and factual disposition necessary to quench my irritation and immediately win my respect. In fact I believe that I wrote an additional comment to that effect and I still reference this exchange today in my Smojoe talks when I discuss the power of complaints. So it’s indeed fitting that my first face to face meeting with Steven should result in us working together to market his time management consultancy in connection to his sponsorship of a unique and exciting photo contest.

Emergency in Toronto should engender some original images showcasing our city’s ambulance, fire and police service in action. The official description asks registered users to lens “… fireman racing into a burning building, or Toronto police officers making an arrest, or EMS technicians hustling a patient on a gurney cart into the back of a waiting ambulance”, and that could be hot. Stay safe though.

Contest ends midnight August 31st, 2009. The winning photo is the picture with the most votes at that time. The Winner, the registered user that uploaded the winning photo, will receive an Esquire Verve men’s watch with quartz movement, silver-tone hands with four diamond markers. This waterproof timepiece was generously donated by Steven Prentice and should a female photographer wish to acquire the woman’s version of this prize, well that’s also possible. In fact his blog will soon have images of the woman’s equivalent. Here’s Steven’s Twiiter.

Bristall Morgan is a good place to get expert advice on how to marry the natural potentials of diverse human beings with new and emerging technologies in the workplace. This organization has been in business over sixteen years, and they deliver high quality workshops, consulting services, web-based teaching, and keynote speeches on subjects concerning the relationship between people, technology and productivity.

Lenzr’s First Sponsor

On Monday July 13th at 3pm in the afternoon Rob Campbell shook hands with Paul Peic and officially recognized him and mycellmyterms.com as Lenzr.com’s first official contest sponsor.

The first official photo contest:  Summer in Toronto

Local photographers are now empowered to get shots of summer wherever they can find them throughout the megacity. At the beach, in the streets, and shopping malls of our mega city  They’ve all been instructed to record exactly where the photo was taken, and so this visual information will be archived and added to the historical record of the city.

The most popular image wins an amazing prize – The winner may choose any one (1) of several smart phones currently available in the Canadian wireless industry, including but not limited to iPhone, Blackberry, Pre, etc This client’s website is still under construction, but will soon contain more details about the generous reward package.

These guys are social innovators using the web for positive change . The My Cell My Terms website will allow Canadians to negotiate their own cell phone terms for FREE.

Just simply tell them what you want, and they shop for you on their Exclusive Dealer Network.  How cool is that?

When they’re done, they rank your offers and then YOU decide which cell phone deal is best.  It’s that simple.

They’re just starting out too, and have almost finished BETA testing their program and hope to launch in the next four days.

Twitter @mycellmyterms

The first customer of Lenzr is another internet start up with big intentions.

Today is Sunday July 11th and Lenzr has been up for eleven days.  In that time seven photos have been uploaded, and one hundred and fifty votes have been recorded. There are twenty seven registered members and sixteen comments. But there’s so much new information about the growth and general reaction to Lenzr.com off site that it has become a daunting task to try and record it all every day.

Anyone seeking information about the birth of Lenzr should read Rob Campbell’s Smojoe blog which discusses the origins of Lenzr and the evolution of the photo contest from its germination on Dumpdiggers.com

Yesterday, Andrew Ainsworth of AndyFilmSchool.com sent me this link which is the New York Times reporting the success of their online photography contest.  Here the author alludes to the networking advantages that professional photographers enjoy when they participate in these types of events.

Lenzr has just launched its first local photography challenge on its new website; the debut contest Best Toronto Skyline is sponsored by Lenzr itself, and the reward is 12 megapixel new Pentax Optio P70 digital camera.

Photo Challenge #1: Best Toronto Skyline

Upload photographs of the Toronto skyline and try to show our city on the horizon from a unique and powerful perspective.

The winning photo will be the image with the most ‘thumbs up’ votes at midnight August 31st 2009.

The winning image will be profiled here, on nearby discussion forums, and a smattering of local blogs.  The winning photographer will then be presented with our respect and admiration and brand new Pentax Optio P70 digital camera.

The 12-megapixel Pentax Optio P70 is a super compact camera with a wide-angle 4x optical zoom lens (27.5-110mm equiv.). It has a 2.7-inch LCD display, Advanced Face Detection, Smile Capture, Blink Detection, and Pixel Track Shake Reduction “to assure sharp images with low noise even in poor lighting.” The Optio P70 can also capture 720p HD video at 15 frame-per-second..

Who will win?

Today the folks at Lenzr.com are proud to announce that our local photo contest has been accepted into Toronto-Forums.com as a separate and distinct content category. We look to the future of this relationship as an official channel by which we might communicate with sponsors and patrons.

So check it out. Now there’s an official Lenzr category on Toronto Forums. This is where I will introduce the first ever Lenzr photo contest, Best Toronto Skyline.

Here’s what it looks like in their index.  Come join and chat here about Lenzr.