Thanks everyone, appreciate the tips. I've never done a forum "poll" nor paid much attention to them. But Eric's suggestion got me thinking. More searching led me to
www.polecode.com, one of several web services that conduct polls. This one simply generates HTML code that you can cut and paste into your own website or blog.
I got a test sample to work fairly well on my Smugmug site. Now I can create a custom Smugmug page with a "pollcode" voting block next to each image. Some other sites do the same, but via javascript. Smugmug won't let you add javascripts, only plain HTML.
The only problem is that pollcode automatically blocks more than one vote from the same IP. Sounds good until you ask 3 people in one household to vote (Mom, Dad, and daughter).
I've been entering this annual print contest for over 10 years and I've learned some important lessons. I have no problem picking my own top candidates. Sometimes I get detailed critiques from other photographers who have extensive experience. The problem I and my fellow photographers have is picking prints that appeal to less experienced judges.
This contest is always judged by 3 people who have a photography background. Usually it's one commercial photographer (wedding, portrait), one photo journalist, and one photography teacher (usually high school). It's a brutal job. They go through about 3,500 to 4,000 photo prints in a 3 day marathon session to pick winners in about 25 categories. So in the early rounds, each print gets only about 10 seconds of attention to be passed to the next round or rejected forever.
One lesson learned over the years: Many successful commercial photographers are good at business, maybe not so good at photography. Photo Journalists don't care at all about technical merits. For them, "right place, right time" is all that counts. Many High School photography teachers were forced into that class and have little practical experience.
When the contest results are displayed, we experienced photographers complain loudly to each other about the poor judging. "How on earth did that one win? It's got blown highlights, blocked shadows, bad white balance, and a bulls-eye composition." It's always amazing how little the judges care about such things. If the photo has emotional impact, it moves on. Perfect technique but with no interest goes in the trash bin.
By asking non-photographer friends to judge my images I get a better measure of emotional impact and interest. And a good balance against my personal bias. Several times the friends have soundly rejected my personal favorite. I entered it anyway, and it did poorly. On the other hand, friends have sometimes picked images from the bottom of my personal list. I entered those and they did well.
One year my friends unanimously picked an image that I hated. I had included it in the candidate list as kind of a joke. It was a hand held, underexposed snapshot at very high ISO. Plus, I thought it was boring. I had to do a lot of post processing to "rescue" it and thus I had a large disrespect for its technical merits. It won 1st place in its category.
We can become overly attached to our own images. Maybe because of the experience of being there. Maybe because of the effort we put into post processing. Maybe because of a personal bias for certain subjects. Example: I have no interest in birds, but look at all the BIFers out there. Some of them shoot nothing but birds. To me, it's the same shot, over and over over.
