Competition Rules
“Butterfly Girl” by Maggi Doak – Winner: Image of the Year Trophy, 2018
Entry Submission Timelines and Where to Send:
If an entry deadline has not been set, when a competition involves and external judge, ideally you should send entries to the NBPS club’s Competition Secretary at least 17 days before the competition date.
This will allow time for all entries to be collated and sent to the external judge at least two weeks prior to the actual competition date. If there’s to be live judging on the night, a much shorter timeline can be considered.
For multiple image entries, using an image transfer site such as ”We Transfer” is preferred. It’s free and works well for larger files.
This will avoid any issues that can arise from restrictions using email on file sizes.
Enter the “Email to” address as
compentries@northberwickphoto.com
Alternatively, submit them as “attachments” to an email using the same email address: compentries@northberwickphoto.com
.
If they are too large to do this, you may need to send more than one email.
Always submit them as .jpg file type (or.jpeg – it’s the same thing).
Most mobile cameras will use this as standard anyway for any mobile phone digital entries.
General Rules
Image Selection. Club members cannot enter an image, or variation of an image (e.g. monochrome version of colour image, cropped part of full image) that has been previously entered in any club competition in any season, with the exception of informal “challenges” where no judging has been involved.
Entries must be the member’s own work.
All entries must be submitted no later than midnight on the deadline date where specified.
Late entries may only be accepted in exceptional circumstances, at the discretion of the Club’s Competition Secretary.
The Competition Secretary has the right to refuse an entry of any image that does not appear to comply with competition rules.
Club members must consider the appropriateness of any image submitted to a competition, including those with recognisable individuals who may have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Preparing Images for Submission (and Digital Projection)
Naming Convention for the Image Filenames:
Images must be renamed before submission to include the following:
- A title for the image* – this helps provide context for the image.
- The name of the member that has created the image.
*Note: Filenames must not contain any punctuation or other special characters (e.g. apostrophes, exclamation marks)
It is helpful to adopt a naming convention for the file name of each image as follows:
Title (which can be several words) in capital letters, followed by a space then the word ‘by’ in lower case followed by another space then the photographer’s first name and surname with the first letter in each word in capitals.
- The file will end in .jpg or .jpeg.
- A file name should therefore look like ‘IMAGE TITLE by Club Member.jpg‘.
When the image is given to the judge, and later projected, the member’s name is removed to ensure that images are assessed and viewed anonymously.
Image Size and Colour Space
The Scottish Photographic Federation’s guidance is that Digital images (DPIs) for competitions should be submitted at a maximum size of 1600 pixels wide x 1200 pixels high whether in Landscape or Portrait mode.
They must also have sRGB colour profile.
Resizing
There are different ways to resize your image to conform with this guidance, a couple of the more common ways as follows:
In Elements or Photoshop, go to File, click Open, and select the image and make any required changes.
Go to Image Resize>Resize>Image Size and enter 1600 in the width box.
If this results in the height being greater than 1200, change the height to 1200, which would then reduce the width.
Click OK to resize the image.
Note: An image in portrait mode should be 1200 high but might, for example, be only 800 wide and a square image would be 1200 x 1200.
Save the resized image as a different file using the naming convention detailed in the section above (Naming Convention for the Image Filenames); this will ensure your original is unchanged.
You can also resize images in Adobe Lightroom (and some other applications) by ‘exporting’ a new copy of the image, without affecting the original.
This is useful for dealing with a ‘batch’ of images which can be dealt with together in one operation. Other software can resize images.
Borders
The advice is not to supply an image with borders unless it is a decorative border considered part of the image.
The only exception could be if an image has a very dark background which you wish to differentiate from the projected black background, then apply a 1 pixel wide white border (and no wider than 1 pixel).