Photo Contest Advice Wanted!

[Neddog]

I'm hoping you guys can give me some advice. I've been tasked with managing our company's photo contest this year. Every year we invite thousands of employees and clients to submit their shots for our contest with the winning shots being used in our annual calendar. There have been some silly requirements in the past that have resulted in entires that weren't high enough quality to use in the calendar...and good submissions missed out on a chance to win.

So here's question #1: I'd love any advice you can give me on how we develop our requirements for submission. Keep in mind the images will ultimately be used in a 9"x12" calendar, so the closer we can be to final, printable dimensions of 2700x3600, the better.

Second, we're considering limiting entries to digital submissions only. In the past we've accepted just about anything people wanted to submit, but we think the time has come to focus solely on digital (at least in part because it makes the management portion of the contest much easier).

Any advice I can get would be HUGELY appreciated!

Thanks!
Jon

[polarbeardiggers]

digital submissions sounds better,keeping in mind that the smaller point and shoot camera's the most frequent owned by people may have a lower resolution power to comply with your larger format,you might want to adjust that a bit ,have a maga pixel limit and higher depending on low you want to start,then break the submissions to catagories,like abstract,landscape,nauture,and general, my opinion would be to have a deadline to submit,then an extra week or two for all employees to vote on their favorite choice ,seperate award for that,along with the final judging on the best catagory shot,by involving the employees for best favorite pick,would make for a unique twist in the contest,those are my views,hope this helps.

[Greg McCary]

Maybe require the file to be 5 megapixel or larger. There is nothing wrong with film as long as the scanned file is a good enough quality for a 9x12 print. Most department store scans would work for film.
Greg

[masdog]

If you're going to set a megapixel limit, make sure you instruct people how to output their files to meet that limit.

[SmartWombat]

More questiosn than answers - sorry !

As a calendar I assume 12 finalists
Are you going to use only the finalists ?
Or are you harvesting the images and plan to use any of them ?

For ease of submission, and saving disk space, you will probably want JPEG.
For final print use, you may want TIFF.

Make sure that for Mac and PC users you specify what the colour space (sRGB) and gamma (2.2) settings should be, so that the images are comparable.

Do you have enough email bandwidth to receive 2700x3600 highest quality JPEG images?
You're looking at over 2MB per file which will overwhelm most email accounts.
Another reason for accepting initial submissions at higher compression and then requesting the candidates at higher resolution JPEG for final judging.

I would set file size and dimensions to a point where you can screen the image, but your email won't be overloaded, yet the image quality won't be so bad (high compression of a large image) that you can't make sensible decisions about it.
Or make sure your IT systems can cope with multi-megabyte emails and that you have a process in place to quickly extract and save the images.

Will you also accept postal submission, with CD-ROMs containing images ?


Would you want to get a group of maybe 24 that were good enough in JPEG and then request the TIFF images for final judging and print use?

Do your printers want images in Adobe RGB and not sRGB ?
You may have to specify that the winners send in images in the right format for printing, if high resolution JPEG isn't adequate. I know next to nothing about what your printing requirements will be for calendar production.

[photophorous]

If you start telling people things about file sizes, color space, and pixel counts, you'll only get submissions from serious photographers because average point and shooters will be intimidated. If you let anyone submit a print, the details will all get worked out in the judging, where only the final result is important. If they don't want to put the time and effort into preparing the best print they can make, then they don't deserve to win. I don't see any need to complicate the matter by confusing people with technical jargon. The print is the final product. I wouldn't submit a negative to a contest, so why would I submit a digital file?

The company I work for did something like this a few years ago as a way to raise money for charity. All submissions were prints, of any size or format, up to 11x14. They hired a few local professional photographers to come in and judge the photos, divided into categories (portrait, landscape, fine art, etc.) and then there was also a people's choice award. The prints (about 100) hung on the wall in a common hallway for about two weeks before the voting. The winning prints were then professionally scanned and made into a calendar, and it looked great.

Paul

[polarbeardiggers]

here here,simple and easy to the point is the answer,well said photophorous.

[freygr]

If you start telling people things about file sizes, color space, and pixel counts, you'll only get submissions from serious photographers because average point and shooters will be intimidated. If you let anyone submit a print, the details will all get worked out in the judging, where only the final result is important. If they don't want to put the time and effort into preparing the best print they can make, then they don't deserve to win. I don't see any need to complicate the matter by confusing people with technical jargon. The print is the final product. I wouldn't submit a negative to a contest, so why would I submit a digital file?

The company I work for did something like this a few years ago as a way to raise money for charity. All submissions were prints, of any size or format, up to 11x14. They hired a few local professional photographers to come in and judge the photos, divided into categories (portrait, landscape, fine art, etc.) and then there was also a people's choice award. The prints (about 100) hung on the wall in a common hallway for about two weeks before the voting. The winning prints were then professionally scanned and made into a calendar, and it looked great.

Paul

I would say that they need to submit a 8 by 10 inch high quality glossy print. I have allot of nice photos which I've taken with a 3.2 mega pixel camera, that I can and have printed at 8 by 10 inch prints of.

Its easier to judge if all photos are the same size. If junk is submitted it's easier to find. The last contest I had to have slides made and hand delivered them to the drop off point.