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Chelmsford Photo Marathon 2016

What's a photomarathon?
The 'photographic marathon' was conceived in Spain in the 1980s and first made it to the UK (Cardiff) in 2004. It involves competing against others and the clock to take and submit a set of photos — one image for each of a set of previously undisclosed topics — with no off-camera processing allowed.

Normally this involves 24 photos on 24 topics in 24 hours, or 12 photos on 12 topics in 12 hours.

Chelmsford Photomarathon
The regular format is too easy for Chelmsford, so they've halved the normal time limit, requiring 12 photos on 12 topics in only 6 hours. That's very little time to digest the topics, think of ideas, find locations (free of other photographers), take photos and decide what to submit, as I found when I went to Chelmsford to take part in their 2016 Chelmsford Photo Marathon.

Around 100 people met up at the start, with some apparently participating remotely from the USA, so the rules clearly hadn't put people of participating. The topics turned out to be Water, Wheels, Change, Graphic, Rest, Bokeh, Handmade, Flipped, Converge, Mirror Image, Behind the scenes, and A Gift. After a fun but frantic day I made the deadline with a few minutes to spare and was finally able to stop to eat.

Winning

I wasn't able to get to the opening of the exhibition a couple of weeks ago, so missed the results. When I did make it a few days later, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd won three categories — Graphic, Handmade and Rest — as well as the 1st prize for the competition as a whole. So thanks for your sponsorship, CameraWorld, and thanks to the people featured for their cooperation, as well as the artists at Harry Flashmans Tattoo Parlour.

And here are my three category winning photos, as taken direct from the camera (no post-processing):

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