Every year on World Photography Day the internet fills up with photographs. We wanted to do something different with ours. Instead of picking a favourite ourselves, we handed that job to you.
It started with a call on Instagram. One frame each, we said. Not your portfolio, not your greatest hits, just the single photograph you would stand behind. Ten of them made it through, and from there it stopped being ours.
For a week you voted. Two photographs at a time, head to head, round after round. Win your duel and you go through. Lose it, and if enough people still loved your photograph, you got another shot. Ten became six, six became four, and last Monday the final four settled it between them.
And you kept coming back. There was nothing in it for you. No prize for voting, no discount, nothing to win by showing up. You showed up anyway, round after round, to decide whose week this was going to be. Thank you for that. And thank you to the ten photographers who let a crowd of strangers judge their work, which takes more nerve than it sounds.
Here is where it landed.
We had been following Yellowstone's Wapiti Lake wolves for hours when the day gave us something we never could have planned. Eight wolves, black, gray, white and every shade between, gathered shoulder to shoulder at the river's edge. For one extraordinary moment, an entire wild family came together in front of my lens. I couldn't have posed it. I couldn't have predicted it. I could only be ready.
Eight wolves, one moment, and somebody standing there ready for it.
Amy wins
The Kiboko City Classic 18L+ and the City Sling 6L
Watching some Tawny Eagles in a tree next to the road, I suddenly noticed some movement in the grass. Three small lion cubs, left by the mother when she went hunting. I caught this glimpse of the one cub looking through the grass.
He went out to photograph eagles and found this instead.
Jacobus wins
Traveling Highway 527 NW, I came across these two at dusk. I grabbed my camera and was lucky enough to spend about forty minutes with them on the side of the highway. It was magical and one of the greatest highlights of my life.
Forty minutes on the shoulder of a highway, and she calls it one of the greatest highlights of her life.
Debbie wins
The other seven
None of this works with three photographs. Seven more people put a frame forward and let it be judged in public, and their work is the reason the whole thing was worth voting on. Go follow them.
We make bags. But the reason any of it matters is on this page.
Ten people went out, waited, and came back with something worth looking at twice. A whole lot more of you cared enough to pick between them. We did not build that, you did, and we are lucky to get to hand out a few bags because of it.
See you next World Photography Day
Every photograph here is published with permission and credited to the person who made it. The work stays theirs.
