Two seconds before disaster

Round 3
Image 2 — "joker colleague" : 3.20
The only entrant to miss the brief's whole mechanism: he is already on the floor. The chair has been pulled, the fall has happened, the man is down and shouting — this is the disaster, not the two seconds before it, and all the tension the theme offered has been spent before the shutter opened. The office reads as an office and the prankster's grin is nicely wicked, but the faces in the background dissolve, the colours sit in a muddy middle register, and his sprawled pose never resolves into a body that fell that way.

Image 1 — "Super salto" : 3.60
Much better timing — she is fully airborne and horizontal, hair streaming, a colleague already sprinting across the room, and the floor is coming whether anyone likes it or not. The bright clean office is a smart setting choice, because the banality makes the violence about to happen funnier. Two things blunt it: nothing visible caused this, so she reads as levitating rather than falling, and her face is oddly serene for someone two seconds from landing on her spine. Give her an expression and this climbs.

Image 3 — "Poor dog. Time is ticking" : 3.90
The wittiest idea of the round by a wide margin — invert the food chain, shoot three ordinary cats like a slow-motion villain walk down a wet alley, and put a chihuahua the size of a shoe in their path. It is staged like a film poster and it earns that: the three advancing silhouettes fill the frame edge to edge, the cobbles hold reflected light beautifully, and the deadpan menace on those cat faces is the funniest thing I have judged all week. The little dog turning to the camera is the perfect final beat — he is appealing to US, and we cannot help. It overcooks his eyes into cartoon territory and the paws go soft under scrutiny, but this is a complete piece of comic staging.

Image 4 — "The Point of No Return" : 3.95
The one that produces actual dread rather than a laugh, and the only artist who attempted something genuinely difficult: a multi-figure action scene in heavy weather with a wall of water arriving. The orange oilskins against the grey-green sea is a superb colour decision, and the deck is properly dressed — ropes, buoys, nets, everything loose and about to become dangerous. What makes it is the man braced at the right, looking straight out at us while the others still run; he already knows, and that single held gaze is what turns a storm photo into a picture about the moment before. The secondary crew are anatomically loose and their faces blur under any scrutiny, which is the price of attempting a crowd. Worth paying. My winner.