Pictures of the Year International (POYi)

Do you follow us on Twitter? Have you liked our Facebook page? Well, if you haven’t then I guess you wouldn’t have known that today’s blog was going to be about the Pictures of the Year competition that’s being held at the University of Missouri-Columbia right now. Guess it would pay to follow us, huh? (wink, wink)

Anyway, to give everyone a break from all the pinning/ pin-realted posts lately I thought it would be kind of fun to go in a different direction once again and talk about the Pictures of the Year competition (after all, we did talk about the College Photographer of the Year and it would only be right to talk about both competitions equally).

According to the POYi website, the competition started in 1944 and was originally titled the “First Annual Fifty-Print Exhibition” contest. The mission of this contest remains the same. Well, what is that? The goals of this competition were and still are “to pay tribute to those press photographers and newspapers which, despite tremendous war-time difficulties, are doing a splendid job; to provide an opportunity for photographers of the nation to meet in open competition; and to compile and preserve…a collection of the best in current, home-front press pictures.”

In 1948, the name changed to the News Pictures of the Year Contest and just nine years after that the name changed again after the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) and the University of Missouri merged their contests. This formed the Pictures of the Year contest. That name stuck until 2001 when the contest was opened up to everyone around the world, thus creating the name Pictures of the Year International.

This year’s contest started last Tuesday (February 5) with the news division. As of today, the judges are going to continue reviewing the sports division, specifically sports story editing and sports photographer of the year. If you’re interested in being a part of the judging you can listen to the live stream and join the chat room. The POYi site also has a detailed schedule of what categories are going to be judged on what days, which is really helpful considering the contest lasts until February 26. (Note: I was going to hyperlink the live stream for everyone but I goofed it up. If you follow the link for the POYi site and scroll down a little bit you’ll see the “Judging Live Stream” icon on the right.)

In addition to having the live stream of the judging, you can feel free to like the POYi Facebook page and/or follow the POYi Twitter account. They also have a Vimeo account if you’d like to check that out as well.

College Photographer of the Year

Each year there’s this little competition amongst photographers called the College Photographer of the Year. It’s open to any photographer enrolled in a college or university. Most years there are more than 600 photographers from over 130 colleges around the world that submit their work to be judged. But why? Experience, knowledge and feedback are just some of the reasons.

In 2005, National Geographic Magazine returned as a contributing sponsor and currently offers an internship to the Gold winner in the Portfolio category. The College Photographer of the Year, Runner-up College Photographer of the Year and winners in the Individual Story and Multimedia Project (Individual/Small Team) categories of the contest are awarded equipment and additional educational opportunities provided by Nikon Inc., Media Storm and the Missouri Photo Workshop.

The College Photographer of the Year Competition was founded by Cliff and Vi Edom in 1945 (which makes this year the 67th year of the competition). The University of Missouri administers the contest with support from its co-sponsor, Nikon Inc., whose generosity allows CPOY to offer free entry to college students worldwide.

Some of the judges include Robert Hood from NBC news, Kurt Mutchler from National Geographic, Janet Reeves from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and many more. Altogether there’s nine judges. If you’d like to see all of them you may do so by clicking right here.

Although there’s still a lot of judging to be done between now and tomorrow the University of Missouri has a lot of volunteers working to post the most up to date photo winners for the categories thus far. If you’re interested in seeing the winners for the categories that have already been judged, you can follow this link.

Below is a photo and corresponding caption of the bronze winner for the sports action category that was judged on Monday. Other categories that were judged Monday include sports feature and spot news.

MU Junior tailback Kendial Lawrence rolls into the end zone, scoring a touchdown, on Nov. 12, 2011 against the Texas Longhorns at Faurot Field. The Tigers defeated the Longhorns 17-5. Texas was the last Big 12 team for MU head coach, Gary Pinkel, to defeat.

The MU School of Journalism has also set up a blog for the CPoY competition. If that’s not your speed you can check out the CPoY Facebook page. If that’s still too much information to take in and you need little blurbs, say about 140 characters or less, you can check out the CPoY Twitter account. If you’d just like to skim over the entire website, you can do that by following this link.