Meet Your Neighbor: Photography Collaboration with the Greensburg Community Announced

Greensburg, Pa – Photography collaboration project, Meet Your Neighbor, a focus on the people of Greensburg, will start featuring submissions February 1 on social media.

The Downtown Greensburg Project, who last year created Collection273, a photography collaboration with scenes from the Greensburg area, is once again looking to local photographers to submit photos. This time, submitting portraits of people who are either from Greensburg, currently live here or who work here.

“We wanted to elevate this year’s project and push local photographers to really explore their craft,” said Jessica Hickey, founder of the Downtown Greensburg Project. “We want the submissions to be creative and to learn about the subject through the photo and the story included with it.”

Meet Your Neighbor will run from February 1, 2018 through January 31, 2019, with two submissions being featured each week on the Downtown Greensburg Project website, @meet_your_neighbor Instagram and Facebook. The collaboration will be exhibited in the Spring of 2019 and all featured submissions will be printed in an 8×10 format for the exhibition.

“Taking photos of people is about history, looking at our time, culture and society through portraits. There are so many parts to a person, there’s always something real going on and capturing that in a photo is beautiful,” said Hickey. “The whole point of Meet Your Neighbor, is to do just that, meet someone in the community, learn about them and in turn show us what you learned by taking a photo that embodies that person or group of people.”

Submissions are accepted by posting on Facebook and Instagram, tagging the Meet Your Neighbor social media accounts on those platforms and using #meetyourneighborgbg. All submissions must be taken between 2018-2019 and include a short story or information about the subject. All featured submission photographers will be tagged in the post with instructions on how to submit the high-resolution image and sign the release for the image to be included in the exhibition. The image and permission must be submitted within 2 weeks of your featured post or another image will be selected to be featured. All featured submissions will be cropped to 8×10 format for printing please see below for tips and explanations on photo cropping.

For questions or more information please email hello@downtowngreensburgpa.us

Photo Crop Information

All images taken on cameras and smartphone are a 2×3 aspect ratio by default. We recommend that you use this default and do not submit square cropped images. It is much easier to crop a 2×3 to a 4×5 for print than a 1:1 (square crop) to 4×5. To allow for the easiest crop, please leave space around the portrait. If you shoot the portrait too tight, the cropped image may lose part of your subject’s face. See the images below. The blue lines show the original image ratio of 2×3 and the red lines show the 4×5 cropped ratio.

Images can be submitted either vertically or horizontally composed. If you backup a step or two, it will put some space above and below your subject in a vertical portrait like seen above: The red lines show what the final 8×10 print would look like in the gallery show.
For a horizontal portrait, allowing space on the left and right will allow space for cropping like seen above: The red lines show what the final 8×10 print would look like in the gallery show.
This is what can happen if you photograph the image tight on the person without giving space around them to allow for cropping. The final image may not look like you want it to look like.
Showing 3 comments
  • James Murphy
    Reply

    Great idea! Are the photos limited to the City of Greensburg, or can they include surrounding communities like Hempfield Twp, South Greensburg, and Southwest Greensburg?

  • Tiffany
    Reply

    I’m so excited to see who inspires everyone and how many wonderful people from the community collaborate on this project!

  • Kara
    Reply

    This is so exciting! Now I guess I need to get out & photograph a few people 😀

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