Hello, Posse!
As most of you know by now, Stephen HATES having pictures taken. He has long bemoaned having to endure my passion for taking pictures and cringes whenever he sees me with a camera. We often get into debates about whether it is necessary or not to post "selfies" of him on his social media to better connect with his audience. As is evident from the lack of "selfies" on his social media, you can tell I have never won this argument.
To remedy this conflict I came up with and idea I think is quite brilliant, even if I do say so myself, and it should be quite fun for all of you, should you care to help us out. Last year we went on vacation and it was already decided before the plane tickets were bought, that I promised not to take photos of Stephen. Since I wanted photos with Stephen in them while we were on vacation I came up with a work around. I made a mask of Stephen's face and we all took turns holding it up for photos.
It was crazy how much fun we had with this. People we were traveling with readily volunteered to have their photo taken as "Stephen" everywhere we went. Even some locals got into the fun in various places we visited. Now, we want you to join in the fun with us.
I am going to post all the official rules in a later blog (once we get all the particulars worked out) and I will post a png file of Stephens face you can download and print out. You have the option to hold the image up as a mask and take a photo or photoshop the png face on an old photo.
You MUST to hold all rights to the photo you use. You can't download a photo of Iron Man and photoshop the face into the suit. We need to be able to use all the photos for our social media promotions. All photos must be at least PG13; nothing obscene or controversial. This is a family friendly book serial and website. We want to keep these photos in line with our brand of family friendly.
I don't know about Stephen, but I am really looking forward to seeing what people come up with for these photos. I hope we get some cowboys on horseback, someone riding a tractor, even just a guy in a cowboy hat would be great. Below you can see some examples of the photos we took on vacation. Some of these we used the mask and some we photoshopped the face in later. We hope these give you some ideas for when we get this contest going.
I hope you will all play along and we post all the final details soon and list the prize categories. I think we might do a few like Best Western Photo, Funniest Photo, and Most Literary Photo. We will be posting the official contest rules soon . . . stay tuned!
Have a great day!
