Canon Wants to Hear the Stories Behind Your Lost Photo Moments

Canon "Your Second Shot"It’s happened to us all at least once. We lose a record of that special moment by screwing up the photo. In the old days before digital that meant bad lighting, blurry images, red eyes, maybe a thumb in front of the lens or even lost film negatives, slides or prints. Now that people have much better quality cameras and can take more photos these incidents happen even less, but still that once-in-a-lifetime photo can still be lost through lost camera, memory cards or hard-drive crashes.

How it Works
This summer Canon launched Your Second Shot, a campaign promoting the PowerShot ELPH 300 HS. People are invited to submit their blurry or messed up photos and the story behind them for a chance to win one of six cameras. Photos will be submitted in six rounds with a judging committee selecting ten videos for public voting in each round. The top three vote-getters in each round move onto the final round where the Grand Prize Winner will receive a $1000.

I was very excited about this campaign when I first saw the commercials and read through the website. However, as I began to dig through the rules, I was disappointed by the complex process and prizing awards.

How I wished it worked
First: The multiple rounds seem overly complex. I would have liked to see one or maybe two rounds with the top 10 from each appearing in a final round of public voting. Right now (September 5) there are over 700 entries, it’ll be interesting to see if entries trail off or increase over the other five rounds.

Second: The prizing seems weak, a $250 camera would be a fine prize for all 20 finalists in my scenario suggested above. It would have been great to see the winner get their photo disaster recreated up to a certain value – while that may have been complex to administer it would have made for a greater story in the end.

Overall, a very cool idea for campaign – I would have liked to see more of that initial ‘big idea’ carried through the process and prizing.