Weekly photo contest: Motion

Ready for another weekly photo contest? Of course, you are! This will be our third weekly photo contest. The first week our theme was sunrise and last week it was coffee. We've had stellar entries over the past two weeks, but now it's time for a new contest. This week I want to see your best photos with motion!

Winners from last week

Last week our theme was coffee. There were so many good photos, but I had to settle on the one I liked the most. Congrats to michalrak for winning! And congrats to everyone else who entered you're all very talented! Head to the forums to check out all entries.

michalrak

Congrats to michalrak on the above photo. It's a beautiful shot captured by his Lumia 1320 and edited in Adobe Photoshop Express for Windows Phone.

Motion

This week our theme is motion. It's a little trickier than capturing a sunset or coffee photo. You're going to need to capture an image that conveys motion. How you interpret that is up to you, but you can use the image above as inspiration for what we're looking for.

How do you capture motion? Traditionally you'd need to use a shutter speed that was a little bit longer and took your picture while tracking and following a moving subject. There's a lot of trial and error, but the rewards can be great. It's how automotive journalists and sports photographers capture their subjects. That's an old fashioned way, these days you can also use the smart sequence feature in Nokia Camera on your Lumia. Use whichever method you want for the photo contest this week!

The photo above was captured this past Sunday by me. It's a horse race at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in Del Mar, California. It was my first time at the horse races, and I couldn't pass up on the opportunity to capture the motion of these incredibly fast horses.

I captured it using the Lumia 1520 using Nokia Camera. I used the smart sequence mode, which captures multiple photos in a very short amount of time. From there, you can edit the photos to remove faces, remove moving objects, get the best shot, get an action shot or do motion focus. As you can guess, I did the motion focus. I then opened it up in Photoshop and adjusted the curves a little bit and cropped the image for the post.

Rules

Rules are going to be just like last week. Here they are:

Picture must be taken with a Windows Phone
Picture must be uploaded to the contest thread (linked below)
You have to tell us what device you used to take the picture, and any special software or apps you might have used. Editing your pictures is fine, this is art
Feel free to add a little back story, we want to know how the picture came to be
You must have used a valid email address to register here at Windows Phone Central, so I know how to contact the winner
Only one entry per week per person

We're going to continue our social experiment from last week. Share any pictures you take for the contest on Instagram and Twitter using the following hashtags. It's a fun way to at a glance check out your competition and get inspiration. Plus we're building a community of Windows Phone mobile photographers!

Here's how it looks this week.

#wpcpc
#motionwpc

This doesn't count as your entry; it's just a fun way to track the photos on social media. Your entry still needs to be in the forums!

Prize

One winner will get a $25 gift card to the Windows Phone Store. You can use it to buy apps and games in the Windows Phone Store, Windows Store or Xbox Store.

We'll pick a winner Tuesday night (August 19) at 11:59 PM ET. Winners will be announced in a blog post for the contest next week.

Quick PSA: We set up dedicated sub-forum in the Windows Phone Central forums to keep the photo contests going forward. You should bookmark this page, so you never miss a contest.