The colour white

This photo entitled ‘Everything is Still’ is just beautiful. I love the minimal composition, the delicate black lines of the telegraph poles and wires. It has just the right amount of detail to save it from being banal and the balance of the composition is perfectly executed. I even like the grey sky!

The whiteness of this photo is dazzling. I love the brightness of the garage doors as juxtaposed with the softer tones of the pebbledash walls. It would have been interesting to see the addition of the shadow of a person within the photo to see how it could have contributed to the composition.

There were a lot of photographs of snow in this competition, but for me this was the strongest. I love the diagonal shape of the wooden fence across the frame, and the shifts in the shape of the fence prevent it from being boring. The tree at the bottom of the frame is perfectly positioned, as is the delicate snow-covered foliage in the background.

I love the humorous attitude of this photograph of a cow. You can almost hear the animal trying to speak to the photographer. I also love the composition – it’s simple yet strong and creates an effective image. That is something that can be extremely difficult to achieve when photographing animals.

I love the graphic nature of this photo of paint flaking on a wall. The composition is very strong and the asymmetry of the cross shapes compliments the flaking paint. Personally, I might have chosen to Photoshop out the mark in the top-right corner of the frame, but this is a very small issue in a photograph that otherwise shows excellent observation.

This long exposure light painting photo of the South Bank skate park is simply beautiful. There is a real elegance in the shapes created by the light. These shapes appear to have been really considered as opposed to the usual tendency for the light being used to create more chaotic shapes. The whiteness of the light creates a great balance against the darkness and the graffiti in this space, which must have been very difficult to shoot in.

This photo of a horse’s eye is very simple and yet extremely strong. There were many photographs of animals submitted for this competition, but this was the best. The decision to reduce the composition to just the eye is a very good one, and using a shallow depth of focus in the background adds strength to this powerful image.

I find this photograph of an empty shopping mall extremely spooky – it’s like a still from a science fiction film. The lighting on the large column on the left of the frame is rather strange - perhaps it’s been Photoshopped or maybe a flashlight was used, but I nonetheless like the intention of the image. Its composition is a bit ‘messy’ at the bottom of the frame, and as an architectural photographer I’d like to see the verticals straightened to stop the convergence. But overall, this is an arresting image.

I love the whiteout nature of this photograph, which looks as if it has been shot in blizzard condition, but it was actually shot on a beach. It definitely answers the theme of white! But what lets it down slightly is the composition - there needed to have been more space between the people, and there appears to be a third person behind the chairs. The photographer just needed to have waited until the people separated slightly as this would have made a more cohesive composition.

This photograph is an exercise in minimalism, and it successfully engages the viewer instead of becoming boring, which can often be the case. The vertical lines of the windows are perfectly composed. My only slight reservation is with the street lamp - its inclusion in the photograph is that of a compositional foil, but I feel it needed to be more angular in order to create a spatial tension in opposition to the regularity of the windows.

This ‘constructed’ photograph is very well executed. Instead of looking out into the world to answer the competition brief the photographer has ‘constructed’ the image, creating a simple paper figure to cast a shadow. The effectiveness of the image just shows that even the simplest things, when well composed, can make a successful photograph.

This photograph of a parking garage is perfect. I love its panoramic format, which is particularly complimentary to the architecture being photographed. Both the photograph and the architecture don’t appear real - they are more reminiscent of the work of Thomas Demand or Andreas Gursky, who use photography to ‘construct’ their images.