Nine new themes adorn the Windows Personalization Gallery, all of them featuring gorgeous photography from participants in the Open Call project, including the one above from Australian photographer Tracie Louise, part of her series that’s new in the gallery, “A Rainbow of Birds theme.”
The Open Call project is an ongoing, open invitation to anyone to submit their own images to be considered for the Personalization Gallery, writes Jennifer Shepherd on the Windows Experience Blog.
“So far, we’ve published almost 120 themes and more than 230 wallpapers featuring photography or artwork submitted by members of the community, and many more are on the way,” she writes.
There is a lot of competition, she says. “We receive so many thousands of submissions that fewer than 5 percent end up being chosen. The sheer volume of submissions also means that the time between when you submit an image and when it actually appears on the gallery can be quite long – up to six months or even longer.”
Shepherd is a member of the panel of reviewers who looks at “every single submission we receive, and carefully assess each photo or artwork before making selections and preparing them for publication.”
When panel members review submissions, they look for several qualities, including original artwork and photography; details that are crisp and sharp; images that are “dramatic, beautiful, interesting or serene, not dull, depressing or controversial.” Landscape photos should give a “feeling of depth and dimension, with foreground, mid-ground, background and sky.”
California photographer Tom Mansfield’s debut on the Personalization Gallery, with one of his photos above, “beautifully captures the dramatic silhouettes and vivid tangerine skies of nightfall” in the Sierra Nevada in the “Sierra Sunsets theme” collection, Shepherd writes.
Learn more about the Open Call project here, and to read Shepherd’s entire post, head over to the Windows Experience Blog.
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Suzanne Choney
Microsoft News Center Staff