Thoughts on photo competitions
I’ve learned something this week.
It’s that trying to organise a “fun, family friendly, inclusive photo competition” aimed at allowing people who take holiday snaps to join in along side those who shoot with honking great DSLRs – it’s that those with the DSLRs have an astounding capacity to be jerks about it.
The rules of the game started off as:
- Deadline is 1pm Saturday
- Photos must be taken this week, and of the festival (daytrips to the seaside don’t count)
- One entry per person
- No photoshopping
That last rule was put in because not everyone has a laptop with them, let alone the skills or inclination to drive photoshop. It’s essentially an attempt to level the playing field and allow everyone to take part. It’s also been the bane of my week.
It started off as “That’s ok, I use GIMP” – so it was changed to “no post processing” – this was the worst thing I could have done. I’ve spent all week having the same discussions with every bugger who shoots RAW. I’m fed up with them asking “what am I allowed to do when converting raw to jpeg?” I started off trying to answer these questions, “whitebalance is allowed, exposure tweaks aren’t, sharpening and noise removal are not, cropping and straightening is right out” but last night, one shooter in particular (who it turns out, is not even intending to enter) wound me right up.
It started as your average “does converting to jpg count as post processing” progressed through some “cloning should be allowed so I can eliminate dead pixels” and turned into “your rules are completely arbitrary, you should be using the set of rules that my favourite photo competition website uses as they’re clearly much better”
It’s rare that after 10 days of chilling out in a field I get so steamed up about something that I need to take some time out, but I walked off site for two and a bit hours, and walked for 7.5 miles down country lanes in the dark.
It took 2 and a bit hours of stomping along in the dark for me to come to the conclusion that what I’d experienced is a fundamental difference in approach to photography.
For me, a photo is about capturing a moment in time, a subject, a feeling. It’s about composition, timing, and emotion. It’s about what you point the camera at and when you press the button. For some, it’s about the technology, the toys, the gadgets, making each pixel technically perfect, ironing out any percieved imperfection carefully and methodically.
So, the Bungay Photo Competition will be going ahead tonight, we’ve had 6 entries so far and half the site aren’t even awake yet – but if it happens again next year, I’m having nothing to do with it.
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Upgrade pains
I’ve just updated my gallery software, it seems to have caused a couple of wobbles with my wordpress integration. If images aren’t displaying for you, hit refresh and they might. If that doesn’t work, try clicking where the image should be.
I’ll fix this as soon as I know what’s going on.
Update: I think I’ve knocked it on the head now.
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Crow
Cor!
Erm, swift update – I’ve just been informed it’s not a crow, it’s just a black pigeon – sorry.
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Site wobbles
Yes, I know the site is wobbling and all the pictures have vanished. You can all stop emailing me about it.
I made the stupid mistake of trying to upgrade the software that runs the site – and it seems that the new version of the software uses *significantly* different urls for the photos – so different infact that I can’t easily craft a set of rewrite rules to fix things transparently.
So I’m going to do it by hand.
I’ll update this post with my progress.
Update: 1am Wednesday – I’m going to have to do this by hand editing every single sodding blog post. All 127 of them. I’m not realistically going to manage to do that all in one go so I’ll do it a bit at a time over the next few evenings.
Update: 1:40am Wednesday – I’ve done March/April and I’m now making mistakes, so I’m going to bed.
Update: 21:15 Wednesday – I’ve done February – and am having a break for some food. I should really take a photo for today at some point
Update: 23:25 Saturday – I’ve done back as far as August.
Update: 17:47 Sunday – I’ve fixed all broken image links. At last.
Update: 19:00 Sunday – Introduced the “Archives” menu, fixed up the photoalbum theme
Update: 19:40 Sunday – Imported all the image names and descriptions from the old database
Update: 20:25 Sunday – The albums are, for the most part, now in chronological order. There is a quirk with february – but it’ll do.
Still ToDo:
Fix up Feb / Jan / earlier postsFix the “Photo albums” menu to work with the new gallery softwareImport the gallery/album/image titles from the old (and incompatible) databasePick through the new software and re-order the galleries in reverse chronological orderFix the stylesheet so it matches what I used to have- expose image ratings on blog posts (one of the two main reasons for upgrading)
If I ever decide to start a forklift upgrade of the code at 10:30pm – somebody slap me.
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Clearing out
I’ve been rummaging through a number of boxes, which I’ve been meaning to sort through for years. I’ve found something rather special.
It’s the receipt from my first ever juggling convention. Over the last few years, it’s bothered me that I can’t quite pin down which year I started juggling in. One of the landmarks I had been unable to pin down was my first convention.
I was there for a single day – Sat 2nd Oct 1993 – It doesn’t really help me to date when I learnt to juggle though, but I remember being able to juggle clubs by that point. I also remember Mushy Pea Jon, compering the games, wearing a chicken suit and standing on a step ladder.
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