Replying to Concerning the weekly photo contest

There has been a bit of discussion over the last couple of days, about how this contest is turning out to be. Several issues have been brought up, and we’re going to try and take the contest in a slightly different direction.

The first issue at hand, is file pulling. Over the course of this contest, we have seen members submit a photo within 10 minutes of the thread creation, which makes it very obvious that they went into their Flickr, Photobucket, what have you account, and picked a photo that reflects the topic. While it is okay to do this, we really want to avoid it. The point of this contest is to go out and use your equipment, and be creative. How else are you going to learn if you’re just pulling files? This leads to the topics that are being chosen. They are unfortunately too broad, and too simple. We want the winner to take some time to think of a more complex subject to photograph. Say your idea is “emotion”, which is easy to capture. We can change that and make it “sadness” or “anger” to give a little more meaning, and a little more challenge to taking a photograph. It will also encourage everyone to go out and shoot, and hopefully decrease the amount of file pulling.

Another issue is the photos that are being used more than once. We are instilling a new rule, in that a photo can only be used one time. The idea here is not to take one photo and see how many subjects you can have it apply to. Again, we want everyone to get out and shoot.

And lastly, is the length of the submission period. In order to maximize the amount of new photos being submitted, we are extending the submission round another week. So there will now be two weeks to go out and capture a photo, and then the 3 days of voting for both all submissions, and the top 5.

If there are any concerns, questions, or comments, feel free to add them to this thread, as your opinion does matter! It is the members who make this contest worthwhile and fun.