On Of The Summer Sunset Photo Contest: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Summer Sunset Photo Contest is and who runs it

WOBM-FM runs On Of The Summer Sunset Photo Contest, a public-vote photo ballot for New Jersey that lives on wobm.com, the broadcaster's web home. WOBM-FM is a radio station, and the contest is one of the audience-participation formats radio outlets use to keep listeners coming back to the site during the summer: readers submit their own sunset photographs, the station's team sorts through them, and the shortlist goes to an open vote.

The format is a best-of photo vote, pitting audience-shot shoreline images against each other. After a week of taking submissions, the station narrowed the Summer Sunset Photo Contest down to what its ballot page calls the 25 very best of the best, and those photographs are what Round 1 asks the public to judge. The ballot's own framing, "Best Sunset At The Jersey Shore", tells you the subject matter: shoreline sunsets photographed by the station's own audience rather than by professional entrants.

Because the contest runs on the broadcaster's own domain instead of a hosted balloting platform, the voting page, the rules wording and any follow-up rounds all sit under the station's control. That matters for anyone following the contest across years, since it means there is exactly one place to look: the station's contest pages on wobm.com.

Facts at a glance

Which editions of the sunset contest are confirmed

The contest is annual on the evidence of its edition years: confirmed runs in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024 and 2025. That is six editions across the stretch, with gaps where no edition is published for 2020 and 2023. 2025 is the latest year with a confirmed run, which makes the contest a recurring summer feature rather than a single promotion.

The voting phase sits in the summer, running from June through August. Within that window, the station first collects submissions for roughly a week, then narrows the field, then opens Round 1 for the public vote. What the published materials do not carry is precision: the day the window starts, the day it ends, the dates of any round after Round 1, and any nomination deadline ahead of the finalist cut are all absent from the ballot materials.

The same is true of the rule set. No published per-person limit, eligibility wording or prize detail accompanies the ballot as held here, and no separate rules page for this contest is part of the confirmed material; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The station prints what it prints at the moment the round goes live, so a reader planning a vote or an entry in 2026 should treat the wobm.com ballot page, not this summary, as the operative timetable and rulebook.

How a supporter votes on the Round 1 ballot today

Voting is deliberately simple, which is typical of a radio-station audience ballot. A supporter opens the Round 1 page on wobm.com, scrolls the gallery of 25 finalist sunset photographs, picks the image they believe is the best sunset at the Jersey Shore, and casts a vote directly on the page, with no outside platform sitting in between.

The 25-photo shortlist is the whole field for the round. The station's ballot page describes how the field got there: submissions came in over a week, and the station's team narrowed them down to the strongest photographs. That means a voter is choosing among pre-selected images, not submitting anything at the voting stage. Anyone who wants their own photo on a future ballot needs to catch the submission window, which falls earlier in the summer than the voting round.

What a supporter cannot read off the current materials is whether the ballot requires an email address, an account, or nothing at all beyond a click, and whether the same person may come back repeatedly as the round runs. Those details are whatever the live page says on the day. The practical advice is to open the ballot, read the small print printed beside the gallery, and vote within whatever limits the station sets there, since the ballot page is the only text that governs the round.

How this ballot sits beside its New Jersey neighbours

New Jersey has an unusually deep bench of public-vote contests, and the Summer Sunset Photo Contest occupies a narrower lane than most of them. Where the state's big readers-choice programmes ask voters to pick businesses across dozens of categories, this contest asks a single aesthetic question about 25 photographs of the shore at dusk. The audience is the station's listeners and anyone who follows wobm.com's contest pages, not a business community courting customers.

The neighbouring programmes on this site's New Jersey coverage show the range. The Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice and the Best of Bergen Community's Choice Awards are publisher-run best-of ballots with broad category slates. The Best of Jersey Shore Contest overlaps this contest geographically but votes on businesses rather than photographs. The Best of New Jersey programme and the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice round out the set, and the Bergen & Morris Top Dentists ballot covers a single professional vertical.

What separates the sunset contest is its host and its shape: a radio station, a single question, a 25-photo field, and a submission round feeding a summer vote. For a photographer or a sunset lover it is the most accessible ballot of the group, because the entry path and the voting path both run through one broadcaster's site.

Strengthening support for a finalist photo

Support in this contest comes down to moving people from seeing a link to actually voting, and the ballot's structure shapes how that works. The field is fixed at 25 photographs before Round 1 opens, so the work is persuasion, not entry. A finalist's strongest assets are their own circles: a personal share with a direct ask outperforms a generic post, and a reminder to everyone who agreed to vote closes the gap between intention and action. Because no ceiling on repeat participation appears with the ballot, how many returns one person may make is governed by whatever the live page states during the round, so check it before building any repeat-vote plan. The station's rules on outside assistance are likewise whatever its ballot page prints. General methods for rallying support in public ballots, without guessing at any single contest's rules, are gathered in our votes guide, and the organizer's own wording always takes precedence over anything written elsewhere.