April 2013 TBB Facebook & Twitter cover photo winners

Last month, we announced that each month we’ll be featuring a new photo by one of our readers on Facebook and Twitter. After TR kindly arranged everything, I had the privilege of picking the first month’s cover photo winners.

For Facebook, it only seemed fitting that I should pick a photo of the Cybercity collaborative build that RoninLUG & friends (led by Andrew Lee) put on for Bricks by the Bay 2011:

Winning - BBTB 2011

For Twitter, I picked this fantastic helium transport by Robert H. (Robiwan_Kenobi):

NCS Helium-3 Transport Rover

I’m really pleased by just how much participation we got, with over 170 photos from 130 builders. It seemed like everybody submitted their best work this first month, and that made my job incredibly hard.

(Pssst! With so many awesome photos, here’s a tip. Remove your photos from the pool and add them again. We’ll consider them again another month.)

Since this was our first month, here are a few random observations about what worked and what didn’t:

  • This isn’t how you get blogged, but we certainly found a few gems we’d missed otherwise!
  • There were scores of gorgeous photos that just didn’t work because of the composition, mostly because of where Facebook and Twitter put our logo and page text on top of the photo.
  • Vertical (portrait orientation) photos really don’t work at all. As much as I love looming medieval towers and tall sculptural figures, we can’t really use them on Facebook and Twitter.
  • With so many great buildings, vehicles, and dioramas, it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll ever choose to feature a photo of a single minifig for a whole month.
  • It’s a good idea to brand or watermark your photos online, but large branding is distracting when the photo is going to be used as the “face” of The Brothers Brick, so I skipped past photos with big logos or chunks of text.
  • We love microspace here at TBB, but since I’d been using one of my own microspace photos for the last year or two on Facebook, I excluded several remarkably awesome photos (like Pierre’s) for this first month. Looking ahead, we’ll definitely be taking into consideration the subject matter or theme of what we’ve recently featured in selecting the next month’s photos.

We hope readers and builders alike enjoy this monthly challenge, and I’m looking forward to what other contributors pick next month and beyond!

Finally, if you aren’t already following us elsewhere, be sure to Like TBB on Facebook and follow TBB on Twitter.

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