14 DAY TRIAL // At the start of December 2009, Microsoft kicked off a photo contest designed to allow professional and amateur photographers to submit their imagery for a change of being featured as the Bing background for an entire day. As the company promised, the winner, along with the winning image, was announced on December 21st, 2009. The picture at the top of this article has been voted as the winning photo for the Bing Home Sweet Home Page Photo contest. As the contest theme required, the winning photo depicts the home city of author Justin Kraemer. What you are able to see is the Seattle skyline, a town Kraemer shares with Microsoft.
“Justin had just purchased a new lens, the Sigma 30mm F/1.4 and this was one of the first images that he captured with it. The photo is a 3 exposure HDR that was tone mapped in Photomatix and then processed in Photoshop Cs3. By the looks of his photo we are certainly glad he made the recent lens purchase and as Justin said “it made a very good addition to my camera bag.” We couldn’t agree with him more,” revealed Kristin Meldahl, from the Bing team.
But, there is more imagery that was submitted as part of the Bing Home Sweet Homepage Photo Contest, some of which is still available for your viewing pleasure. Kraemer also has additional photographs he shared with the world on his personal website. The winning image of the Seattle skyline will be featured as the wallpaper of Microsoft’s Bing home page on Wednesday January 6, 2010.
“We were excited to see that the entries for this photo contest came from across the globe. The finalists reflected this diverse selection, with photos from the US, France, Spain and New Zealand all making the top 10. In addition, this time around we added “Bing Editors’ Picks” which allowed us to include a few photos that didn’t make the finals, but our editorial team thought stood out. For a complete view of the finalists and editors’ picks check out the photo contest Facebook album,” Meldahl added.