Holidays Around The World: Smashing Photo Contest

2012 is around the corner and the year is (already!) coming to an end. We’d like to know how upcoming holidays are celebrated in your city. Just send us a photo of your kind of Christmas or New Year’s Eve and with some luck you may be the winner of some truly smashing prizes! We’re giving away five wonderfully designed books as well as five golden tickets for our upcoming Christmas special bundle.

But I Don’t Celebrate Christmas…

Of course, not everybody celebrates Christmas, but there is still something special about the atmosphere that upcoming holidays create worldwide. You may take pictures of your office New Year decorations, a market in your town or even a winter wonderland you’ve discovered! You can also make a photo of a special event  —  an event that makes you relate to the year coming to an end, or even your list of your New Year’s resolutions, or anything else really. Just keep in mind to stay creative!

The Prizes

The best photos will be rewarded with one of the five books presented below. The winners can select which book they’d like to have. We hope that the book will be delivered in time before the holidays, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee it. We’ve found the books in a selection by Maria Popova over at Brainpickings.

Visual Storytelling
Stunning, ambitious, and thoughtfully curated, Visual Storytelling is part high-concept dictionary for a language of increasingly critical importance, part priceless time-capsule of bleeding-edge creativity from the Golden Age of information overload, the era we call home. Image source.

Moby-Dick In Pictures: One Drawing For Every Page
This artbook collects Matt Kish’s lo-fi drawings in a 600-page visual masterpiece of bold, breathtaking full-page illustrations that captivate eye, heart, and mind, inviting you to rediscover the Melville classic in entirely new ways.

Visual Complexity
A rigorously researched, beautifully designed, thoughtfully curated anthology of the worlds most compelling work at the intersection of these two relatively nascent yet increasingly powerful techno-cultural phenomena, network science and information visualization. Image source.

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout
In Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, artist Lauren Redniss tells the story of Curie through the two invisible but immensely powerful forces that guided her life: Radioactivity and love.

344 Questions: The Creative Persons Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment
A pocket-sized compendium of flowcharts and lists to help you figure out lifes big answers by ever-inventive designer Stefan G. Bucher.

Submission Guidelines

• Your photo should have JPG format, a maximum size of 4000 x 3000 pixels and should not exceed 8 MB in size.
• Each participant may send one photo at most.
• You may take photos of anything or anyone, as long as it fits the theme of the contest and nobody is harmed.
• Please name your photo with your full name (john-peterson.jpg)
• Please do not send ZIP, RAR or other compressed archives — just the image.
• You must own the copyright of the photo you are submitting.
• Submit your photo to photos@smashingmagazine.com.

All selected photos will be published in an upcoming Smashing Magazine post. So, get your cameras ready and shoot!

Examples To Get You Inspired

Just to give you an idea and inspiration for your entry, here are some photos to get your creative juices flowing:

Deadline and Announcement

Please submit your photo by December 15th at the latest. The qualifying submissions and the winners will be announced a couple of days later after that. We will showcase the most interesting photos here on Smashing Magazine, including the names of the contributors.

Please note: your photo will be used only for this event, and you will retain the full rights to it.

Lets Go!

On your marks. Ready? Set? Go! Send your photo to photos@smashingmagazine.com! We look forward to your photos, folks!

Wishing Y’all Happy Holidays!
 —  The Smashing Team

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Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.