Photo Contest Open for All People Over 50!

by Nina

Baxter Bell, Age 54, by Melina Meza

The YFHA photo contest (see Photo Contest!) is now open to men as well as women. To be eligible, your photo must meet the following specifications:

1. Portray a woman, a man, or people over 50 doing a yoga pose (of any level of difficulty), meditating, or practicing a mudra. No restorative poses or chair yoga at this time. Any body type or race (diversity is encouraged!). 
2. Be a digital photograph (or scan) in a reasonably high resolution and in focus.
3. Have a reasonably attractive physical surrounding (either outside or inside). So no messy rooms, even if we sometimes do yoga in messy rooms. Pets are allowed (though I have a limit on how many cats I can take). Urban environments are as good as nature shots.
4. If the photo is a single person doing a yoga pose, the alignment must be one that I consider to be healthy. And no body parts can be cropped off, unless in an artistic fashion.
5. Be aesthetically pleasing.
6. You must either be in the photo or have taken the photo (that way, I can have your official permission to use it).

Here are some examples of winning photos submitted to me: 

Perry Chattler, Age 60

Vincent, Age 51, Copyright by Sara Bennet 2013

Richard Rosen, Age 67, by Melina Meza

This is a rolling contest  and there is no deadline. I'll keep taking and using photos as long as I'm blogging. So take your time and submit a quality photograph rather than just sending in whatever snaps you have on your phone. I'm going to use the same standards for photos of men that I use for photos of women. Typical reasons a photo is rejected include:

• Photo is too small (resolution is too low), so it will be blurry on the blog.
• Photo is out of focus, partly out of focus, and/or lighting is poor, so person is in shadow or whole photo is too dark.
• Figure is too small within the background, (you will look like an ant on the blog, even though, yes, that mountain is really pretty).
• A body part or parts is awkwardly cropped off (where are your feet and/or fingertips?), or your face isn't showing in a pose when it normally would (the pose was taken from an odd angle or you are wearing a hat and sunglasses).
• The facial expression seems unhappy, uncomfortable, or pained.
• The environment is messy (props, plastic water bottles, bits and pieces of other students in the classroom).
• Alignment of the pose looks unhealthy in my opinion, for example, the head and neck are not in line with the spine.
• The photo doesn't feel inspiring or uplifting to me. (Hey, if we want to get positive images of older people doing yoga out there, the images need to feel positive.)

Although I don't by any means require professional photos, typically a quick snapshot done with your phone in a classroom or out on a hike—unless it is really special—isn't going to make the grade. Trust me, I've seen a lot of them at this point. So if you want your images to be seriously considered, take some time in creating them and take multiple shots of a single pose to get a good one. Arrange the setting and move that plastic water bottle somewhere else. Have someone look at your alignment and give you some cues. Take off your hat and sunglasses and smile. Or, at least relax your face.

To submit your photos, you can either email them to me (see Contact Us) or submit via our Yoga for Healthy Aging Facebook Page. There is no deadline because you will not be competing against each other. Multiple submissions allowed. All photos that meet the specifications will be winners!

The prizes? I will use these photos in our posts, with your name, age, and a web address, if desired. I hope there will be a huge number of prizes.

And you should feel free to “borrow” these photographs and give them even more exposure, as long as you give appropriate credits.

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Friday Q A Why Only Women in Your Photo Contest

Joy Sassoon, Age 60
by Tanya Constantine

Q: Why aren't you including men in your photo contest?

A: The simple answer is that if you scan through the posts on our blog, you will see a preponderance of photos of a white man in his 50s (Baxter Bell). So, to start, I wanted to get a bit more diversity on the blog and I decided to start with women (of all colors and body types). 

Karen Moore by Melina Meza

Secondly, older women in the yoga world—and in society in general—tend to get overlooked, much more than older men. There are lots of photographs out there of older yoga male teachers, and not so many of the females. In general, older women often comment that they feel "invisible," and older men appear as much as 10 times more frequently than older women in media (see The Case of the Disappearing Women Over 40: Anti-Aging and Symbolic Annihilation). Because I'm in the position to do something about that (rather than just ranting about it), I decided it was time to do my bit. And guess what? I posted the photo above of Joy Sassoon on our Facebook page, and it is literally going viral. I think that speaks to the hunger out there for more representation of this group.

However, there have been some complaints about lack of equality in this contest, so because I've received an outpouring of photographs of older woman doing yoga, I've decided that after I'm able to sort through all those photos and have posted a significant number of them, I will open the contest to men. Stay tuned!

Vincent, Age 51
Copyright by Sara Bennett 2013

—Nina

P.S. I received the following comment on Tuesday's post: 

"Although I love the women models I do not like the listing of their ages. If you added a caption with the age of all your models, it would be more balanced. Noting only the ages of women, and only older women, is feeding the 'anti aging' paradigm we would like to avoid."

This comment confused me. I thought women proudly stating their age was a good thing, as we are often taught to lie about our ages or be ashamed of being older. What do you think? Should I include the ages or not? (Of course, if I continue including the women's ages, I would also include the ages of men whose photos I post after that contest begins. I won't be posting Baxter's age on every single photo of Baxter, however, because I considered the photos of people demonstrating our poses to be in a different category.)

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