From portly pensioners bathing in pools to men encountering scarecrows in cornfields and urban dwellers going about their day in the 1960s, the Royal Academy’s current Eyewitness show (see our Preview) is one of the finest testimonies to pioneering 20th century photography.

It also produces some of the coolest black and white images you could hope to set eyes upon, leaving most of us keen to try and re-enact the role of shadowy onlooker.

Try your luck at it and you could win a prize, as the venue has teamed up with Metroprint for a competition inviting the public to submit photographs inspired by scenes of street life, fashion, portraits and abstract subjects, taken on mobile phones or cameras.

The stakes include publication in The Independent on Sunday, super-sized prints of your image, a stack of vouchers and membership of the Academy for a year. Now that sounds worth a shot.

• Visit the competition online to find out more and enter. Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century runs until October 2 2011.