Submission Guidelines
Each paid member may enter up to four images divided as he or she wishes among these four categories: Nature, Nature with Special Effects, Hand of Man, and Special Topic of the Month.
All images submitted for out monthly photo competitions should be:
- As related to jpeg quality/compression, sice is not important, but please pay attention to the image pixel size noted below.
- Images must have a maximum dimension of 768 pixels horizontal or vertical with the exception of panoramics. In the case of a panoramic, the maximum vertical dimension is 512 and the maximum horizontal dimension is 1024 (the maximum native pixel dimension of the projector.) The purpose of these sizing rules is to not disadvantage portrait oriented images or panoramics relative to landscape oriented images. If a larger image is submitted, the image viewer program will not resize the image: it will display the central part of the image that fits within the projector display. (Resizing blurs the image and changes colors.) The judge will have the option of scoring 0 for nonconformance or treating it as ‘found art’ and judging based on what is visible.
- Images should be saved in sRGB color space to maximize color fidelity.
- Submissions should name image files as follows: CCC-SSSSX-YZ-Title.jpg Note: there are dashes or minus signs between sections of the file name.
- CCC = 3 character club code, for us it is ‘CNC’
- SSSS = first 4 characters of surname. If a surname has less than 4 characters, that is fine.
- X = first character of given name
- Y = Category:
- Choose from:
- A = Special Topic of the Month,
- B = Nature,
- C = Hand of Man, or
- D = Nature with Special Effects.
- Z = Number of entry in the category. A1 would be the first topic of the month entry, A2 would be the second topic of the month entry, A3 would be the third, and A4 would be the forth if all four of your images are entered in the topic of the month category.
- Title = Image title 36 characters maximum. Note: some email systems remove spaces from filenames when they receive files. If your email system does this, tell your entrants to use underscores (“_”) instead of spaces. The program will replace them with spaces.
- Example: John Smith, Colorado Nature Camera Club, Special Topic of the Month, Great Blue Heron; would have a filename of:
cnc-smitj-A1-Great Blue Heron.jpg
All competition images should be emailed to CNCCEntries@yahoo.com no later than the Monday before the next meeting.
Categories
NATURE: These images depict wild nature, and include landscapes, both grand and intimate, and birds and wild animals in their natural or adopted habitat. Images in the Nature category may or may not have been edited or otherwise modified to depict a naturally-occurring event; for example, more than one image might have been used to create the final image.
Images in the Nature category must not contain:
- evidence of man as a dominant or distracting feature such as roads, paths, fences, or buildings (at the discretion of the judge)
- captive animals
- inserted backgrounds
- birds at feeders or on a “manufactured” perch (*)
- raptors that are currently in a rehabilitation program
- gardens and greenhouses
Images containing these prohibited elements can be entered in the Hand of Man category.
(*) Images of wildlife with tracking tags (such as wild birds with leg bands) are acceptable in the Nature category.
NATURE WITH SPECIAL EFFECTS: These images depict wild nature, but they have been recognizably altered so that they no longer resemble nature as the eye would see it. Alterations might include the use of in-camera techniques (such as movement during exposure), creative lens filters, camera settings (such as drastically changing the Kelvin setting), or an image editing program, for example. The intent of this category is to show the photographer’s creative/artistic depiction of an altered reality.
HAND OF MAN: These images depict wild nature, but they also include evidence of man, domesticated plants, captive non-domesticated animals, and so on, or they might have an inserted background (such as a wild flower with a cloth background). While photos of domesticated plants are acceptable, domestic animals such as dogs, cats, horses, and so on, are not. Any evidence of man should not be the main focal point of the image but an incidental part of it.
SPECIAL TOPIC OF THE MONTH: These images are related to the Topic of the Month, which is announced in the newsletter. Images in this category must also conform to the guidelines in the other three categories. Keep in mind that CNCC is a nature photography club – if the topic is “motion”, your image needs to show motion in nature and not, for instance, in an auto race or sporting event.
