Lenzr.com is Canada’s only serial photo contest website, offering up new photography challenges for budding photographers every month and rewarding the best photos with real prizes. Lenzr photo contests are something you can share with your children, encouraging creativity in them and bonding over camera and photo editing technology–it is the digital age, after all!

Lenzr has just introduced four new contests in the July-August session, and, of course, four great prizes are on the line. Kids have to be at least 13 years of age to enter the contests on their own, but that shouldn’t stop you if you have younger children–just work on the photography together and enter the contest under your own account!

Lenzr’s Fireplaces and Furnaces photo contest is a bit weird in the middle of summer, we know, but professional photographers and filmmakers do this all the time–you didn’t really think that they wait for rain to fall, did you? Suspend our disbelief! Show our judges your coziest shots of comforting winter scenes–perhaps the kids warming their hands at the fireplace or the dog curled up on the hearth. Teaching your children that what they see in photographs (particularly in mainstream media) is not necessarily a representation of the truth is a good lesson. For example, most of the delicious food photography we salivate over feature motor oil as syrup, hairspray to moisten up a drying piece of cake and white glue instead of milk in cereal ads, etc. Kids should learn early on that photographs can play tricks on our perception, and the best way to learn is to do!

The prize in this competition is  a Sony laptop, courtesy of the contest’s sponsor, a furnace installer located in Ontario. Summer is, financially speaking, the best time to think about installing a new high-efficiency furnace, which will save more money in the long run.

 

Lenzr’s Toronto Tourist Attractions is, unlike its predecessor, a perfect summertime challenge. Canada’s largest city has a lot to offer tourists of all types–international visitors will enjoy The ROM and The Hockey Hall of Fame, nature lovers will be pleasantly shocked by the beauty of the Toronto Islands and High Park, music lovers may enjoy a different festival nearly every weekend, architecture buffs will love the designs of the newly restored Art Gallery of Ontario and the colorful activity of the CN Tower, and Toronto’s many and diverse cultural festivals such as Caribana attract millions of visitors every summer.

Head into Toronto with your camera and show us the unique things you discover! The prize for this contest is an inflatable sport kayak, courtesy of this contest’s sponsor, a Toronto bed and breakfast that’s literally as downtown as you can get, for it’s a ‘Boatel’ moored at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre!

 

Lenzr.com’s Haircuts and Hairstyles photo contest wants to see photographic submissions with a hairstyle (or someone having their hair cut) as the focal point of the photograph. Hair is one of the first things we humans notice about one another, and kids have a lot of fun experimenting with hairstyles on their own. Where you don’t want to give your kids total creative freedom is with a pair of shears, for obvious reasons.

Show us funny, unique or beautiful hairstyles. You can definitely get the kids involved, even by allowing them to style your hair and then concluding with a fashion shoot–that photo will probably be filed under the ‘funny’ hairstyles, no?

The prize for this contest is a high-end blow dryer + flat iron, perfect for a gift for mom or an older sister or relative! The contest was generously sponsored by a Yorkville salon in downtown Toronto.

Lenzr.com’s Objects in Motion photo contest wants to see the trajectory route of an object, person, animal or force of nature. Yes, the photo may contain a motion blur, but our judges only want to see the object, person, animal or force of nature in motion blur, not the rest of the photograph. Show us planes, trains or automobiles, high jumpers, long jumpers, kids on trampolines, squirrels jumping across telephone wires, dogs chasing them, yanking their leash away from their owner’s firm grip. Last summer Canada’s East Coast got hit with some nasty hurricanes; Canadians of intrepid heart may wish to chase a storm in motion, if they dare.

The prize for this contest is a Sony Laptop, courtesy of the contest’s sponsor, an air freight service that’s constantly keeping objects in motion over land, sea and sky.