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Judge:Ben Yates

From Wikimania

Nominees are rated from 1 to 10, where 10 is amazing, 5 is cool, and 1 is unremarkable. Comments are below each image.

Bio: I'm Tlogmer on Wikipedia; I designed the Wikimania logo and I write a wikipedia-themed blog. Away from the LCD, I'm a tech writing student and punk-ish keyboard player. I'm judging Location Photos, Nature Photos, Portrait Photos, Sketches/Artwork, Maps and Diagrams. (Judicial philosophy: Photos should say something complete, draw emotion, and reflect reality.)

Photographs of Places

8 points

The British Museum Reading Room: Awesome colors, amazing sharpness, symetry made overwhelming rather than dull. Single tiny face peeking out at the center of this overwhelming mass of books and papers seems makes the photo a bit droll.

7 points

Filbert Street, North Beach, San Francisco: The light's great. And it's so sharp! Zoom in and you can make out people's faces. Well-composed; looks good from a distance also; makes you feel like you know what the city's like.
Golden Gate Bridge from below at Fort Mason: Wow. Just a great picture. Sharpness, nice composition, emotion, etc.
Another Place: Great shot: sharp, well-composed, etc. The emotional register is so unfamiliar that it's hard to evaluate.
Captain Cook Memorial Fountain and National Library: This isn't a technical tour de force, like the british museum photo, but the subject matter makes it a beautiful shot: it's a memorial to captain Cook. The spare appearance of the memorial (and the spare composition of the photo) reflect the views that cook probably spent most of his life looking at: sky and sea -- in other words, he would have approved of the photo. (This sounds like overanalysis, but it really was a gut emotional reaction to the picture, albiet one I'm not explaining particularly well.)

6 points

Passy Viaduct: The long-exposed traffic light and blue neon, combined with the soft light on the metal, give it a painterly cyberpunky anime look. However, there's not much context: is the pathway usually so empty of people?

5 points

Mount Shasta: Unremarkable when zoomed-out, but it's incredibly detailed: zoom in and you really feel like you're inside this small western town. The pickup truck going through the yellow light furthers the sense of reality.
Hanko, Finland

Less than 5 points

4: Mt Hotham (Kind of cool, nice sense of place, detail); Utah desert; NYC skyline

3: Australian War Memorial (closeup); Kennedy's Hut; Golden Gate (dark)

2: Australian Parliment; Australian War Memorial (full shot); Dinner plain

1: Transamerica; Michigan Avenue; Malk Abbey

Maps and Diagrams

File:Ant worker morphology corrected.svg
8: Ant Morphology: A cool glass of water for technical illustration junkies (just me?). Lays out a complex subject with complete clarity. (Look at the subtle color differences between -- say -- the Tergite and the Sternite (in the tail) to get an idea of how much thought went into this.) Prints well. Don't care for the font.
7: Han foreign relations: You can see the real (rather than jurisdictional) outlines of an ancient society, with tendrils percolating off. Nation as organism. (Too bad the image isn't big enough to print well.)
thumb|6: Airport Traffic Pattern: Everything unnecessary is abstracted out. I like how the shadows show altitude.
6: Leaf Morphology: Well-designed.
5: Eight Allotropes of Carbon: Nice clear renderings, rotated for your edification.
3: "A chantar" by Comtessa de Dia (long dead): Is this just an ordinary piece of sheet music? (But changing the format would make it unreadable for musicians, and it does look nice.)

Photographs of Nature

I don't have time to lay these out right now.

9: Cows: Through composition and craft, something ordinary becomes beautiful. Good metaphor for wikipedia.
9: North American River Otters: Wow.

8

  • Mandarin.duck: Same reason as for "Cows"
  • Crepuscular ray sunset: Great composition and colors
  • Petrified forest log: Even the sky looks ancient in this picture
  • Telluride Panorama annotated: The hazy blue light is beautiful and the diagram is a cool idea

7

  • Protonotaria-citrea: I like the burst of yellow over grey.
  • Vaalankurkku railway bridge: Colors, shadows, sense of depth

6

  • Day old chick
  • Orb weaver
  • Ozyptila praticola
  • Caerulea3: striking
  • Cancer cells
  • View from connors hill panorama
  • Dawn at swifts creek
  • Ruppberg Sonnenaufgang
  • Anvil shaped cumulus panorama

5

  • Eastern long neck tortoise
  • alpine range
  • Rainforest walk national botanical gardens
  • Litoria phyllochroa

4

  • Snail
  • soldier Crab
  • Gull
  • Morteratsch glacier
  • Lassen NP Kings Creek CA
  • Country house at sunset.jpg
  • Lower Antelope Canyon

1

Butcher's Creek

Photographs of People

6: Mountaineers descending a mixed slope: the photographer was actually there on the mountain.
5: Dan Schlund, the Rocket Man: Cool getup, but he's playing for the crowd in this photo, so I don't know how much reality there is to his expression.
3: Stephanie Smith, Human Cannonball - Melbourne Show 2005
3: A shopkeeper tries on a lehenga
3: Horse jockey and steward