Want to see your photo on a billboard in Times Square?

A number of phone brands have earned a reputation for enabling excellent looking snaps, and this list includes Huawei. To differentiate itself from the competition, the company brought world renowned optics and camera company Leica onboard in 2016, and has since produced some impressive results from its dual camera technology.

Clearly HUAWEI is taking this photography venture very seriously. Not only is it committed to its long term research and development partnership with Leica, but the company has just announced a new program to help promote the results of its consumer camera efforts – called the HUAWEI Museum.

The HUAWEI Museum isn’t a physical location to go and visit though, instead it’s an online community for mobile photographers. It’s designed to enable budding photo enthusiasts to share their works on one of the largest stages in the world: Times Square, NYC.

As part of its HUAWEI Museum initiative, HUAWEI Device USA is hosting the Emergent Project, a competition that aims to call attention to the emergence of a new generation of creators and a new era of creativity. The competition is giving HUAWEI smartphone owners to opportunity to show-off their photography skills and potentially have their worked displayed in Times Square.

Barring a few fairly obvious rules regarding copied or vulgar content, the competition is open to photos of all sorts from anyone shooting photos from a HUAWEI device (including the Nexus 6P). Of course, the photos you submit have to be your own, but other than that you can just get out there and start shooting and sharing to the HUAWEI Museum Facebook page.

Each week, HUAWEI Museum community members will help select photographs to be features across HUAWEI’s social media pages. Each month, a selected winner will be chosen for display on Huawei’s Times Square billboard in New York City. The photos-of-the-month will also be featured in Leica store galleries in New York and Los Angeles.

Which camera to use?

The competition rules state that qualifying pictures must be taken with a HUAWEI, HONOR, or Nexus 6P smartphone. Remember, HUAWEI worked with Google on the 6P back in 2015. So, this means any of the new HUAWEI P10 range, last year’s P9 or Mate 9, the new HONOR 9, 8, 6X, or even older company handsets are all eligible.

Of course, HUAWEI’s recent improvements and partnership with Leica for its flagship phones seems to give a little bit of a hardware advantage to the company’s high-end phones. After all, the latest P10 is obviously going to pack in HUAWEI’s best camera hardware to date – what with it’s lossless zoom, PDAF and laser AF, and OIS enhancements to help take better pictures.

However, HUAWEI’s impressive dual RGB + monochrome camera sensor configuration has been available in its low cost HONOR range for a couple of generations now as well. Complete with the improvements to noise and HDR, a selection of manual mode shooting options, an optional software bokeh effect. Not forgetting that the Nexus 6P sports a camera that’s not far off the pace of more modern handsets too, so the field of competition is wide open.

All of that being said, slightly better hardware specifications are no substitute for a an interesting subject and solid composition, so older handsets are still in with a good chance if you have a good eye for pictures. Finding a unique point of view and potentially even using manual camera settings to find the perfect exposure will have a more meaningful impact on the end result, especially if you’re after a more dramatic picture.

Get into the action!

If you fancy seeing one of your photographs displayed up in Times Square, simply sign up to the HUAWEI Museum community and post your original photos captured on any HUAWEI, HONOR or Nexus 6P smartphone to the Facebook group page using #HuaweiMuseum. Don’t forget to caption your entry with a title, description, and the phone model used to take the photo.

Even if you don’t feel like snapping pics yourself, you can still participate by joining the group and voting for the photographs you think are worthy of the limelight!