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Author Topic: Notable photo competitions?  (Read 2016 times)

-Tom-

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Notable photo competitions?
« on: July 19, 2013, 12:56:26 pm »

Every few weeks I see a post in my email newsletters of RSS feeds about "photography contest winners"...and all of these contests are big name events, brands, magazines, apparently there's a contest being held every few weeks.

The latest one I saw was http://kontinentawards.com/ ... and as always, I saw a bunch of inspirational material there so it got me thinking what other competitions are out there, how to keep track? I want to try it out myself, but I can never get to catch the "submit" phase, only the "and the winners are" moment :)

Any notable comps I should be aware of in the near future?

popnfresh

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Re: Notable photo competitions?
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2013, 02:20:56 am »

www.i-shot-it.com is very popular. Recently purchased by Leica.
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Dave (Isle of Skye)

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Re: Notable photo competitions?
« Reply #2 on: July 22, 2013, 04:55:15 pm »

Tom - I would advise you to save your money, as I think it is fairly common knowledge these days that the vast majority of these competitions, are more about generating money for the people running them, than it is about promoting the work of up and coming photographers. I may be wrong of course, but I never seem to read anything good about photo competitions or the images they select. In fact I once read that some of the competitions actively select the not so good images and reject the good ones, so that their prize winning images will make more people think, well I could do better than that, so I will enter next time and walk away with the prize money, it will be easy..  ::)

But as I said this is not all competitions and I am sure some of them are respectable, but as I avoid them, I don't suppose I am best placed to give you advice on which ones are the good ones and which ones are the not so good ones.

But if you are determined to place your bets and take your chances, then go here or here, and as you can see from the long and growing list, there are more than a few of these money making schemes competitions for you to have a go at.  ;)

Oh and I forgot to mention, you will probably find that you have also given away all the rights to your images as part of the competition rules, which you have unknowingly agreed to by the very act of entering the competition.


Dave
« Last Edit: July 22, 2013, 05:11:18 pm by Dave (Isle of Skye) »
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louoates

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Re: Notable photo competitions?
« Reply #3 on: July 22, 2013, 05:24:34 pm »

I believe many so-called photo contests are really data mining for various advertisers. Most of us can remember when nearly all local "drawings" for prizes at local stores were early attempts at data mining and always were accompanied later with deluges of direct mail and telephone solicitations. Same with exotic trip lotteries. As warned by Dave, there are lots of contests that will require you surrender full copyright protection. Some contests are actually promoted by theft rings that pander images via underground stock photo sites.
A wise man once said "Buyer Beware" for good reason.
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Tony Jay

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Re: Notable photo competitions?
« Reply #4 on: July 22, 2013, 05:50:42 pm »

There are good competitions out there but I would do my homework first.
The warnings from previous posts are very cogent.

Tony Jay
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-Tom-

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Re: Notable photo competitions?
« Reply #5 on: July 22, 2013, 06:19:29 pm »

Well, when I saw the entry fees on i-shot-it.com I just chuckled, I really don't see the point of me dropping 20 bucks for a chance to get my photo voted against hundred of others, and even if I eventually win...what's in it for me aside from illusive bragging rights, what else happens when I win? Does it really matter in my portfolio to mention I won the so-and-so photo contest?

Sidenote...few months ago I attended my country's biggest photography fair/convention, held annually in my town. I was extremely excited to attend Michael Diemar's photography market history workshop...and baffled when I saw I was among 10 other people attending the lecture...

And then they held a photo contest...one of the themes was "Back to the 50's". A whole lot of people signed up. And they've picked the winner who got the 1 year subscription for Adobe cloud;



So much for the competition...

SunnyUK

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Re: Notable photo competitions?
« Reply #6 on: July 26, 2013, 04:41:10 am »

There are good competitions out there but I would do my homework first.
The warnings from previous posts are very cogent.

Tony Jay

Presumably this threat, asking for people to share their experience, is part of doing the homework :-)
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