RCT Photomarathon 2023

This year seen the return of RCT PhotoMarathon, a competition where you have a 12 photo challenge – just take 12 photos in 24 hours!

Only, in this challenge, you have to wait until various times of the day to find out what the theme for each photo is, and, the photo must be taken in order given – if you later decide to retake a photo from a previous theme then basically you have to retake all the photos from that theme onwards.

This year’s themes were released in blocks of 4, the themes were released at;

10.00 am (images 1-4), 2.00 pm (images 5-8), and at 6.00 pm (images 9-12)

1   In the middle     2   Anonymous       3   Control               4   Two

5   Red                      6   Smile                   7   You love this      8   On the edge

9   Oops!                  10   Dilapidated      11   Focus                12   Feel nostalgic

Until the themes were released it was impossible to decide where to go to start taking photos which would suit the brief, let alone decide on what photos to even take. When the blocks of 4 were released you basically decided right – this is what i’m going to look for, and go find it. Always a good idea to allow some variations of photos for each theme, as until you actually look at them later you never know if they are going to be good enough or if you change your mind later there is always a back-up image. This is exactly what happened to myself, I had the idea of 2 coffee’s in a coffee shop for the 4th theme (two), when I finally looked at the images at home – I instantly didn’t like them and had to resort to another image, which wasn’t great but I managed to make something out of it to fit there was no way I was going to re-shoot images and start again.

My final 12 images for the competition – can you guess what goes with which theme?

I’ve got to say, I had some great fun during this competition, deciding on what to take. Some of the photos may seem a bit obscure – gets the person thinking of what I was thinking at the time. I’m not sure if everyone will ‘get’ the images but that’s the beauty of photography, different images mean different things, and can be interpreted differently.

I was accompanied by my other half, who also took part in the event, and I can honestly say even though we went to the same places, stayed together pretty much the whole time – what a completely different set of images !

A big thank you to RCTPhotoMarathon for this event, I’m looking forward to the awards evening – Art in the Attic, in Porth – even if I don’t win any of the topics, just nice to see it on the wall with all the other entries.

All images where taken using the Fuji X-H1 with either 16-55mm f2.8 / 50-140mm f2.8 lens