Hiptop Halloween Hunt II

24 Hours. 26 Letters. 12 Teams. 1 Good Time.

Welcome to the second annual hiptop Nation Halloween Photo-Scavenger Hunt.

Last year, I and some others worked overtime to produce a massive list with hundreds of items to be photo-scavenged. The number and divesity of items surprised many and sent teams scrambling.

Of course, this year everyone is expecting such a list.

So there will be no list.

Welcome to the Alphabet Photo-Scavenger Hunt.

How it works

Your mission is to construct a photo-alphabet that follows a theme. For example, if the theme is "fast food" an entry could consist of pics of an Arby's sign for "A", a Big Mac for "B", Chicken McNuggetts for "C", etc.

Your first job as a team is to decide on a theme. Then you must gather pictures related to that theme for each letter of the alphabet. When you have gathered all the items, they should be submitted to your team blog.

Your team may enter as many photo-alphabets as you can scavange in the course of 24 hours. But, at least one entry must have contributions from all active team members. This way, after the team pulls one theme together if some members want to collaborate on more entries, they can.

Judging and Scoring

Judging will take place in several categories:

• Most Creative Theme
• Most Artistic Photos
• Most Halloween Spirit
• The One the Judges Liked Best

So, choosing a theme like "things found in team members' houses" will make your job easy, but won't score high on the creativity scale. Some themes can become creative based on items photographed. For example, "Office Equipment" doesn't seem too creative, but that could depend on what kinds of offices you have access to - "Spectrograph" is a better entry for "S" than "Stapler" in this case. On the other hand, even common items such as staplers could be photographed in interesting ways if you are going for the Most Artistic Photos category.

Most Halloween Spirit could range from a theme centering around costumes to a theme celebrating all that is ghoulish. Or something else entirely. If you can convincingly tie it into the spirit of Halloween somehow, we'll accept it as a theme.

Some things judges will consider when looking at entries: How unique is this object photographed? How well does it fit into the theme? What sort of effort did the player have to go through to get it? How well did this team work together?

Scoring will also be based on how evenly members contributed to a theme. So, if you have five people on your team, each person contributing 5 items (plus one extra for someone) scores higher than someone contributing 21 items and everyone else contributing one item.

Presentation

By all means, use your team blog throughout the hunt to coordinate, show photos to each other, etc. When you do finally decide on the photos that will go with a theme, however, please present them in some sort of order that will make sense to the judges. For example, the title of the post might be "Theme - Office Supplies. Letter S - Stapler". Posting them in alphabetical order would be helpful, but I recognize that is a bit difficult to coordinate.

Not required for each picture but nice to have would be some info about it "P is for Picachu - This cutie dressed in a pikachu costume was spotted in Atlanta, GA."

Note: I know "X" is hard

Yes, I know "X" is a bit challenging when it comes to this sort of thing. Try to be creative here. Consider brand names if possible. If need be, resort to the time-honored trick of having "X" in the word ("X is in Fox", or "ex-boyfriend", etc.) - but note that this will score lower than a pure "X" word.

Other General Rules

- No posting to an opposing team's weblog. No exceptions.

- No emailing the judges to complain about something you saw on another team's blog. We'll get to everything eventually.

- No posting of pictures other than those taken with the Camera app after the start of the contest. No pulling off pics from old blog entries allowed.

- Breaking of the above rules can result in loss of points, individual disqualification, team disqualification and/or hurt feelings.

- Pictures of other pictures - whether they be from a magazine, book, computer screen, LCD screen of another digital camera, TV, etc. - won't bring many points, if any at all, to a theme.

- Don't get arrested (we won't bail you out)

Good luck everyone, and have fun.

The Teams: Team Axe Team Boo Team D.O.A. Team Eek! Team Jab Team Kat Team Lye Team Maw Team Nip Team Pox Team QED Team R.I.P.