I usually prefer to stay away from all the competitions in India ( though it was one of such thing which got me into nature photography ) – but at times i do participate in few if i really get very tempted. That also doesn’t mean i participate in all the other ones happening outside.
One reason why I hate all those online/submission based competitions in India is the way they are organized and the results that come of it.
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There are couple of them i recently bumped into which had some crazy rules or judging pattern – 🙂
a. There was a conservation related organization which organized a National level competition and the winning entry or the winners were something like Egret eating a fish and things like that. The theme of the competition was in lines with “Conservation” and what they give prizes to at the end of the game is something like this. Isnt that cool ? And over the years they have made sure that they have stuck to such substandard judging and retained a rappo of such sorts !
b. In another contest which had its last date sometime last week – the rules stated, one needs to submit the images which are of the size 1600px x 1200px and the last date is 30th November ( which ideally everyone assumes to be midnight on 30th ). But on the day when people started submitting images a portrait image of 1200×1600 never got accepted ( web based submission ) – because the width was not 1600 according to the way the application was coded !!! A landscape image of 1600×1200 went through fine but not Portrait images. Portrait images were forced to be up sized to 1600px for width before being successful uploaded. If that was not enough, the competition ended 30mins ahead of time at 23:30 instead of midnight which left quite a lot of my friends stranded mid way through their uploads.
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Its high time organizers of competitions in India grow up to the standards and process what international arena is following.
PS: Thought its just two instances i have pointed here, there are lot of such contests happening around us which hardly have a proper pre-defined rules and proper judging pattern.