Photography Competitions Around The Web

The Epoch Times newspaper is now holding the Global 2006/2007 New Era of Culture and Humanity Photography Contest. The submission deadline is February 28, 2007 and the winner gets $1,000 USD (and the gold medal!). Both amateurs and professionals are accepted.

Qualifications and Requirements:

· Who: Amateur or professional photographers who are interested in culture and humanity.
· How: Traditional negatives and digital image files are both accepted.
· When: No restrictions as to when a photo was taken.
· What: Photo composition must include human beings.

Good luck to everyone!

Clown Warm-up

The theme for the February Photo Contest at PhotographyBLOG is Movement. The deadline for this month is February 29, so there are still a few days left. I do not have much “movement” photos in my photo archive, maybe except a few images I already posted in the early days of Phoetica in the article Train to Prague. While browsing some of my street photos, I found one clown picture I decided to submit.

This clown was preparing for the performance, which took place shortly afterwards in the square near to this place. I wonder if the central composition will work for you - I tried to place the clown more towards the edge of the photo, but it somehow didn’t feel right. So the entry name is “Clown Warm-up” and you are welcome to vote for it :-). But constructive criticism is equally sought after.

PhotoFriday is a weekly photo challenge website, whose theme is announced every Friday. Participation is free, but you need to have your own website where you post your photo first, and then you can submit the link to the contest. It seems to be a very popular site - there are already 259 submissions as I am writing this article! There are no prices, but you can get to the hall of fame, called “Noteworthy”. This week’s theme is Abstract. I am not very keen on abstract photography, but I have found one photo in my archive that could qualify, so I am going to try my luck. I wonder if people will consider it “abstract enough”.

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The following report at PhotographyBLOG features a new Digital Photography Contest sponsored by HP and Project Greenlight. It takes some effort to decipher the attached press release, so you will have to visit the official contest site www.hp.com/YOU after all. The contest is called “YOU Take Five!”, and it is a five digital photos you are supposed to take. Those photos should tell some story about anything you would like to share, and the submission deadline is March 31, 2004.

There will be five finalists selected by the panel of judges, and each of them will be from a different world region. You can win a cool prices, but do not get overly happy too soon. The Official Rules lists the countries which can participate, so chances are your country is not among them. If that’s the case, you can still be a winner - just post your “Five” right here at Phoetica!

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But you have to get digital camera first - that’s one of the prerequisites for entering photography competitions at DigitalPhotoContest. Your possibilities are endless - you can compete in 10 different categories each day: Landscape/Nature, People/Portraiture, Travel/Architecture, Action/Journalism, Macro/Abstract, Black and White, Panorama, Animals, Still Life and Digital Art. And it’s even better - you may submit one digital photograph in up to five categories per day! So if your cat do not win the “Animal” category, maybe that broken vase next to it will score in “Still Life”.

The Photo of the Day in each category will be selected by a panel of volunteers and displayed with all honor. Moreover, all daily winners will qualify for the Monthly Contest, where DigitalPhotoContest members will vote for their favorites from each category. At the end of four days, on the 5th of each month, the votes are tallied and the Best of Category winners are announced. Good luck!

© Malgorzata Aly

But I want a nice T-shirt, with a picture on it! See, like this one, with a duck and tulip. “Mom? Well…uhm… maybe I would want more than one…” You know, the photographic forum and competition site called PhotoBlink is running a Photo Contest with the theme T-Shirt Photo. “Some images look better on T-shirts than others,” they are right about this, and your task is to “take a photograph which, in your opinion, makes an ideal T-shirt design.” The participation at PhotoBlink is free, and you can submit your work till 01/29/2004 15:00.

Phoetica thanks Malgorzata Aly for sharing that nice Duck & Tulip photo - this one I found to be the most “t-shirtable”. But the photo competition is still running, so you can come up with something even nicer. I’m just curious, how many T-shirts my mom will have to buy.

Submit it to the BetterPhoto Photo Contest then! Participation is free, and they are running monthly competitions is several fixed categories: Landscape & Travel, Animals, People, and “Graphics, Details & Flowers”. Oh wait, there is one more: if you shot some other creature like extraterrestrial, you are still covered - the fifth category called General is just for you. But don’t get overjoyed yet - the photo of your fellow extraterrestrial needs to be sharp, otherwise their merciless Jury will not be happy…

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There is a new open photo contest at DPChallenge website called Point of View, with the submission deadline January 13 2004. The point is to “come up with a picture that is made more interesting because of the point of view you chose”. Ok then, maybe I should hurry up to climb something!

The previous challenge New Year’s Resolution is over and we can all cast our votes now. The contest theme was really tough, and there aren’t many photos where I could guess The Resolution without reading the title. Anyway, I wish success to all who are determined “To Quit”. At the end, I can’t not mention one photo which really really scared me. The title sounds innocent - Diet - but it’s a real killer! :-)

You can win a big bucks, plus a 40GB iPod! If you live in U.S. or Canada, that is. The deadline for the Go Pro Contest is the end of January, and you can submit “a photo of anything that’s suitable for the enjoyment of all ages”. The photo can be as heavy as 500KB, so this time you can’t blame that “nasty jpg compressions” for making your photo ugly. Meanwhile, you can peek at their nice photo gallery, to get some inspiration.

Another website providing photography competitions on a regular basis is DPChallenge.com. Instead of calling them competitions, they prefer the term “Digital Photography Challenge”. The most challenging rule is, that the photograph must be taken during the contest period, not before. With that, producing an applicable photo can sometimes be really challenging, or as a Longman Dictionary explains, “difficult in an interesting or enjoyable way”.

That’s especially the case when you have just a week to make your photo, and the theme is as metaphysical as the current one: New Year’s Resolution. Oh wait, I didn’t mean all the New Year’s Resolutions are abstract in nature, those can be a very tangible things indeed. Anyway, I am really looking forward to see the submitted photos - maybe they will inspire me to make some resolutions for the next New Year. The submission deadline for this challenge is 6nd January 2004. DPChallenge is running several weekly and monthly contents with interesting themes all the time, so there is a lot of good photos to watch!

After some pondering, I decided to submit an entry to the PhotographyBLOG Monthly Competition. The shot was taken during one winter night in 1961, so scanning and retouching was required. The quality is “not that great", I admit, but I like the photo anyway. The place is just on the boundary between two slovak villages, Belusa and Hloza. The big house on the right side doesn’t exist anymore. And here is the full-sized image: Winter Village

Let’s compete!
PhotographyBLOG is running a Monthly competition, and the theme for December is “Night”. There is no entry fee, and the lucky ones can even win some prizes. The Competition Rules are quite clear: to sum it up, you have to submit one photo, taken by you, whose largest dimension is exactly 600 pixels, and it’s ok to digitally “enhance” it a bit. But you have to manage all that until 2nd January 2004, otherwise the competiton rule #8 will apply to you and your entry will be mercilessly removed.

I was searching for some cool night photos in my pc, but couldn’t find anything “competitable” with the already submitted entries. Yes, the competing images are exhibited continuously - as soon as they are uploaded. Nevertheless, I’ll try to snapshot something during the Christmas time.