Barcodes

To my mind yours was the most successful collage entry into this barcode challenge. The plain codes work strongly by being overlapping on top of each other but by adding the tractor you’ve given your collage a stronger narrative. Your collage can be interpreted as an aerial view of furrow ruts in fallow fields or as crops (whose yields are numbered) being harvested by the tractor. Clever, simple and very, very effective.

Very nicely observed barcode label attached to what I assume is a newly purchased shopping bag. The white solitary tag on the handle works extremely well offset against the rainbow coloured background. In my opinion your photo would have benefited had you zoomed in tighter to remove the white stripe on the right and lessened the black shadow in the lefthand corner both of which take one’s attention away from the barcode. But overall this is a very good, sharply taken, photo which has managed to bag you a worthy commendation.

This is a superbly taken self-deprecating portrait. Sticking a barcode onto your own frontal lobes was a brainwave and the allergy advice title just confirms your sense of humour. Reading the list of ingredients and the directional information where to find the best-before-date completely threw me. It drove me nuts trying to figure out which product the barcode came from. If I had a scanner I’d be able to find out but I suspect it might not register anything as you may well have had the forefront to word and print the barcode yourself.

This mininimalist interpretation of the brief strikes the right chord. Recognising that barcodes resemble black and white keys on a keyboard you’ve added a miniature piano player to complete your musical composition. The attention to detail with the three-dimensional cardboard cutout and perfectly placed drop shadows makes your photo instantly believable. In answer to the question posed by your title - the piano, may or may not be in tune, but you certainly were with your musical entry.

By placing a barcode over the face of a defiant looking woman makes it look as if she’s behind prison bars. Possibly a spy under interrogation unwilling to divulge secret code numbers. Alternatively she could be a visitor on the other side of the bars looking smug at a prisoner’s comeuppance. Whatever the interpretation of your femme fatale image it certainly leaves one guessing - which is half the goal of your mysterious photograph.

Your suburban landscape using barcodes as road barriers makes your suburban landscape quite surreal. The barcode barricades can be clever metaphors for the amount motorists are charged for the right to drive on roads. Road tax, motorway tolls and the high cost of parking are some of the ways motorists are hit in the pocket - not too mention the exuberant price of petrol. Yours is a very original interpretation of the brief worthy of a top ten place - despite the photo triggering off my inordinate sense of road rage.

This is a well taken stand-alone intentional camera movement photos of a linden green-leafed forest. By simply adding a line of same-coloured numbers on a strip of white at the base of your photo you have shown great originality by transforming your ICM rendition into a barcode. The blurred tree trunks certainly resemble barcode lines and you did well to recognise their photographic potential for this challenge and to use them in such a clever abstract way.