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I've noticed a proliferation of photo competitions on the net. Usually they ask your 'best' Holiday - Moment - Travel - Reflections etc. images to enter to be in the running to win all these prizes. In Australia the prizes tend to be DSLRs of various kinds. Often the competitions are set up so that the organiser gets to gain e-mail addresses of the participants and general public voting for the 'best' image, if the competition is judged by the 'public'.
I've submitted a few of my works to some of them (they make it so easy to take part: you just upload your image, size often restricted to less than 2MB, and off you go). I just went through an excruciating process of the Manly Daily Warringah Mall Northern Beaches photo competition. Here's the story:
First of all, upon trying to upload one's image, your whole computer freezes for some 5-10 minutes. Also, if you wanted to see your uploaded entry, or any other submitted entries, the same thing: to see the tiny thumbnails in a filmstrip format you get, you had to wait the excruciating same time. Once your browser works again, you can scroll horizontally to see the small images of the most recent entries. If you want to see what's in a particular image, you click on the thumbnail, and get a slightly larger jpg to view, which fails to show any details. Well, you've worked your *** out getting every single pixel right, and then you see your photo reduced to a 500x700 approximation of the original - doh.
Then, after the deadline for submissions, I get this automatically generated e-mail to all participants from a JP, from the 'Manly Daily Team':
Thankyou for your entry in The Manly Daily-Warringah Mall 2011 Community Calendar Competition, which you entitled: Bilgola Plateau
To determine the photos to appear in the Calendar (and the winner of the Canon 500D SLR) the photos are now available for public voting on The Manly Daily website. The voting is open until Sunday November 7.
To give yourself the best chance of winning be sure to let your family and friends know to vote for you. As there are a large number of entries we would suggest the following to make the process as easy as possible:
Find your picture in the gallery,
Copy and paste it into an email
Send the email asking for their vote with this link: http://manly-daily.whereilive.com.au/photos/gallery/warringah-mall-community-calendar-2011-photo-entries/
The response has been huge so giving your friends a description of where in the gallery your photo appears will help them a lot. Also, make sure you make it clear to them that they can only vote once.
Well, they had to specify how to find any photos because nobody would try to go through all of these apparently 1300 entries by scrolling the entire filmscript and enlarging all of them to find the best. To make the thing even more difficult, it seems they had to create two separate sets of files because they failed to accommodate the large number (for them) entries.
I replied to JP:
I think this message is quite unfair: I don't have any 'family and friends' that I would bother with trying to make them vote for me. My photos are to be judged by their merits!
Here's his reply:
The images to appear in the calendar were always going to be determined by public vote.
The photos are not only up online but are also on display at Warringah Mall where passers-by can vote at their leisure – anyone can vote for you and so your photos will be judged for their merits, however, an email to any family and friends was just a suggestion that may give your photos a better chance.
Well, I wasn't happy with this reply, so I responded with this.
I understand (or guess) your system became stuck by the unprecedented number of entries to the competition (I'm sure you know the performance of your website regarding to this competition has been excruciating), but it doesn't justify the organiser to promote unethical ways to have more people to vote. Any objection to my view doesn't stand a chance from a moral point of view!
No reply, but I went to see the entries at the Mall. Imagine the scene: 1300 printed photos on display - small postcard size, mass hanging, the lowest ones staring at your toes, the highest ones you had to look up to, but there weren't anybody looking at them during my time there anyway. What a mayhem, to say the least!
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| The winner, as shown on Manly Daily Website, and in the paper (a cropped version of the original, I understand). |
Well, finally Manly Daily announced the winner (just one, not the other 11 selected for the calendar). Apparently the most votes were given to an image of a cockatoo (or which there were numerous entries, but this particular one was YELLOW!). This is not to put down the image, which was by a young Canadian graphic designer specialising in Photoshop. This is to criticise the organiser for failing to get things right: failing to promote skill ('this is a promotion based on skill' stated in their 'terms and conditions'), failing to provide proper technical support for the submissions and for viewing the entries on-line, and failing to present them in equal terms and proper quality for the passers-by at Warringah Mall.
Here's one of my entries (featuring WHITE cockatoos). I'm not saying this is a better photo,
but I'm sure it's more interesting: a flock of cockatoos raiding my lemon and lime crops!
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