Monica Moody
Published: October 12, 2005
Greg Riegler needs a ride. He doesn’t have a car right now, so getting around to take pictures is pretty hard. On the other hand, maybe being left at home with nothing to do but drink soda would be the best thing for the PJC student.
Greg had been drinking Jones Soda for quite some time. He always noticed the open call on the bottle which read, “send us your photo, if we like it we will put it on our label.” So, he took a chance and submitted 12 photos in February. About 3,000 photos are submitted to the Web site each month and of those only about one percent of the images are actually chosen for print. The odds were against the self-taught amateur photographer from Gulf Breeze.
Jones Soda Company collects all submitted images in their online gallery where they remain for six to seven months. From all those images, a staff member for the company will weed out around 100 images, which will in turn be continually picked over until only about 25 possible label images remain. The company CEO will then personally decide which pictures will go on which flavor label.
Greg had almost forgotten about his submissions when he received a letter in the mail detailing his achievemnet. The chosen photo was the first or second photo he had submitted to the Website and was actually one of the first photos which he had attempted in a purely artistic manner. This was not just a random snap shot, but something he had carefully put some thought into. He was stunned and amazed to say the least.
The photo depicts the railroad that runs along the eastern edge of Pensacola along the Pensacola Bay. The exact location was near the bend where Scenic and Cervantes meet.
“I pretty much let the camera do what it wanted to do,” he said. “I found my fixed focal area and just kind of took the shot off to the side and captured it at such an angle that the tracks came out of one corner and went out the other.”
The new Strawberry Lime Jones Soda bottles featuring our beloved Pensacola rails will be distributed nationally some time within the next month or so.
