Photo Comps

PS you could use that argument in racing sport though, hence why f1 banned some technology ;)

Ha! I do like that analogy. MyBB hosts a motor racing event and invites all members to come and race with the winner getting a nice prize. Arrive in your Renault Clio to find out you are racing against a chap who hired an F1 Ferrari for the day :D Yip, level playing field that ;)

I think most people will judge a contest like this on a shot that makes them go "wow!". Everyone has at some point taken a photo with a cellphone so they are aware of its abilities and limitations. When they see something they have not been capable of replicating themselves, they are impressed. Doing this is far more likely with equipment they have not had exposure to.

It would have been very interesting to see if the "elephant vs crocodile" photo had been included whether it would have won. I reckon not. On initially seeing it we would have all been in awe of the moment caught but when it came to judging we'd be more critical and start looking at the clarity etc. Just my opinion.
 
It's an expensive prize, by no means a small competition.

I never said what size the prize was. I referred to the competition being a small local village club one. In the grand scheme of the internet, MyBB is a small club :)
 
Ha! I do like that analogy. MyBB hosts a motor racing event and invites all members to come and race with the winner getting a nice prize. Arrive in your Renault Clio to find out you are racing against a chap who hired an F1 Ferrari for the day :D Yip, level playing field that ;)
I'll take you up on that offer! Give me the Clio and I'll bet that I'll beat you in the F1 car, simply because you don't know how to drive it. By the time you've figured out how to stop it from stalling, I would have won the race already :p Same thing here.
 
I'll take you up on that offer! Give me the Clio and I'll bet that I'll beat you in the F1 car, simply because you don't know how to drive it. By the time you've figured out how to stop it from stalling, I would have won the race already :p Same thing here.

Also a good analogy.
 
So from these posts I gather there were professional photographers that entered this competition? (Not that this was against the rules of the competition btw)

If I may be so bold, which of the entrants were professional photographers then? I'd like to compare how the "professionals" are doing compared to the amateurs in the results thus far.


For the record, I know a couple of people who call themselves "professional photographers" but doesn't know which side of the camera is front. :whistle:
 
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I entered the competition, but I am not a professional. I bought the bridge camera before I went on my work trip, but I did not have time to really test out all the settings etc. I had a lot of help from forum members regarding settings etc. The picture that I have entered took about 2 hours of waiting for the right moment - the migration was so scattered, and I wanted to wait until they are all herded together and had the setting on black/white. The photography bug has bitten me, and most weekends I drive around and take pictures and test the settings. I am still practising alot, and I enjoy it tremendously. I wanted to buy a SLR camera for my photography, but I cannot afford that at this point in time. My dream is to ultimately make a coffee table photo book and get it published, about all the wild animals that I encounter. I also want to make post cards with my photos and give them to our clients as gifts. I am going to pursue my dream, and it's competitions like this that encourages me even more, when I get recognition for my photos.
 
I'll take you up on that offer! Give me the Clio and I'll bet that I'll beat you in the F1 car, simply because you don't know how to drive it. By the time you've figured out how to stop it from stalling, I would have won the race already :p Same thing here.

I would be even happier with a gokart :D
 
I'll take you up on that offer! Give me the Clio and I'll bet that I'll beat you in the F1 car, simply because you don't know how to drive it. By the time you've figured out how to stop it from stalling, I would have won the race already :p Same thing here.

This. I actually made this same remark in the submissions thread, but it went unnoticed it seems.

Fasman, if someone is willing to have a R8k cellphone the likes of an iPhone 4S and then bitch and moan about people with DSLRs, they're neglecting that they didn't need to buy an iPhone 4S. They could have stuck with their iPhone 4 and used the money they'd saved to buy at LEAST a camera like this.

If they truly stood a chance on merit of their capability, they could have gone out and rented a DSLR for the day to take a prepared-for photo or borrowed a camera from a friend or family member.

If, on the other hand, they know no one from who to borrow a camera, cannot afford to rent one and cannot afford to get anything better than a Blackberry 8520's camera as far as cellphone cameras are concerned, it simply sucks to be them. They saw a competition that was open to classes far out of their league and so were that much more limited in the potential of what they could have done when considering the breadth of possible subjects for which photos could've been submitted.

If the competition were limited to compact and bridge cameras only, people like me would be out. If it were limited to cellphone cameras only, people like me would be out. Yes, a Blackberry Curve 8520's camera is still a camera, but it might as well be a webcam from the 90s that got stuck into the phone - even someone like me could draw clearer pictures than this thing can take.

If it were limited to DSLRs a lot of people would again be out, but that doesn't mean there wouldn't be people with expensive cameras that aren't all that good at using them to get impressive photos. What about them? Should they now complain because they're being grossly outclassed?


But look at the cameras on the phones of the people entering this competition. I was compiling a list of them just for curiosity's sake, and by the looks of it, these are people with multi-thousand-rand phones. They could have gotten a cheaper smartphone and used the leftover money to get a compact or bridge camera, but they didn't, so they in a way have no right to complain about being outclassed in terms of gear. Look at ClintZA's Nokia N8's photos - those, for a phone as cheap as it is, are great. That phone costs R2.7k today. That's R4k+ saved over something like a Galaxy SII or iPhone to spend on an advanced compact, advanced bridge or even an entry level DSLR.


By the way, go look at this competition. I was going to enter, but I stopped bothering, because the judges for it are insanely heavily biased towards wildlife photos largely because that's what they do - they're wildlife photographers. They know those kinds of photos and have a greater appreciation for what goes into them. That doesn't mean I would've stood a chance against the caliber of photos being submitted there even if that weren't the case, but it does mean that there's virtually no point in me trying there because I simply don't have access to interesting wildlife to go take photos of where I am and cannot afford to go out there to pursue wildlife to take photos of either.

Do I complain about it? No. I've moved on and have other photography competitions to try my hand at.
 
Just as a random question, does the competition exclude use of touched up or "Photo Shopped" pictures? I mean will an entry still be valid if someone has enhanced colours etc?
 
I'm pretty sure that some of the final entries have been post processed, so I don't think so.
 
Just as a random question, does the competition exclude use of touched up or "Photo Shopped" pictures? I mean will an entry still be valid if someone has enhanced colours etc?

Yip, there were no rules regarding that.
 
I entered the competition, but I am not a professional. I bought the bridge camera before I went on my work trip, but I did not have time to really test out all the settings etc. I had a lot of help from forum members regarding settings etc. The picture that I have entered took about 2 hours of waiting for the right moment - the migration was so scattered, and I wanted to wait until they are all herded together and had the setting on black/white. The photography bug has bitten me, and most weekends I drive around and take pictures and test the settings. I am still practising alot, and I enjoy it tremendously. I wanted to buy a SLR camera for my photography, but I cannot afford that at this point in time. My dream is to ultimately make a coffee table photo book and get it published, about all the wild animals that I encounter. I also want to make post cards with my photos and give them to our clients as gifts. I am going to pursue my dream, and it's competitions like this that encourages me even more, when I get recognition for my photos.



Follow your dreams. As Walt Disney said: "If you can dream it, you can do it".



If you can't afford a DSLR, consider buying second-hand. You get some incredible bargains...people in a tight financial spot, or people with too much money on their hands selling their hardly used camera to buy the newer version.....

There is a classifieds section on www.outdoorphoto.co.za (hope I'm not transgressing rules by "advertising another website). Just make sure you're buying from a reputable person. A good indication there is normally to go and check a guy's gallery - if he/she doesn't have any photos in there, it means they're not really active, or alternatively the number of forum posts - if a person has hundreds or thousands of posts in the forum, it usually means you can trust them.

Last year I was in a bit of financial trouble (my company closed down) so I sold my one lens, which has probably taken less than a thousand photos and still in mint quality, for half the price of a new one.
 
@nanonyous you keep on moving the goal post about the argument, just now it was "phone users had the same chance of winning" now its "Phone users should not have spent that much money on phones and should have gotten a DSLR instead" , these arguments are polar opposites, please choose one and stick with it.

As for complaining I am not, just defending that the better camera a person has the better pictures they can potentially take, skill can only get you that far in photography, hardware limitations do exist.

If I really wanted to kick up a fuss I would complain that 5 of the users got away with using a width of 800 that is quite a bit larger that the 600 requested for the competition.
 
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I was dealing with a guy that had advertised his gear on outdoorphotos not too long ago regarding a Canon 5D he was selling. He tried to convince me that 116k actuations on the thing was low and that the shutter mechanism is rated for 250k shots (which no Canon camera has ever been rated for), and that 5Ds frequently go well beyond that mark.

My offer to him was based on the assumption that within a relatively short space of time after buying the camera, I was highly likely to have to replace its shutter box, which is a R1.5k+ job.

In other words, research what you're making an offer on beforehand, make sure it's what you need and make sure you know what to look for and what questions to ask before committing to a purchase.
 
@nanonyous you keep on moving the goal post about the argument, just now it was "phone users had the same chance of winning" now its "Phone users should have spent that much money on phones and should have gotten a DSLR instead" , these arguments are polar opposites, please choose one and stick with it.

As for complaining I am not, just defending that the better camera a person has the better pictures they can potentially take, skill can only get you that far in photography, hardware limitations do exist.

If I really wanted to kick up a fuss I would complain that 5 of the users got away with using a width of 800 that is quite a bit larger that the 600 requested for the competition.

It's not moving of posts, it's bringing up supplementary points and they are wholly valid.

Seriously.

If a guy shows up to a race that's open class in his 60s VW Beetle, he's asking to get his ass handed to him. If that same guy happens to live in a multi-million rand house he bought just last year for no good reason other than because he wanted it, he's being a ass if he complains. That's what it boils down to.

"I'm trying to enter a photography competition that's open to people who have gear that have a higher technical value than my R10k tablet/smartphone camera that I bought because I wanted it to go with my new Golf GTI and gaming PC. These jerks are making this competition completely unfair!"


Now, for the potential of cellphone cameras - again. ClintZA. He submitted photos that were perfectly within the limitations of his phone's camera and compared to the vast majority of the other submissions, even those from DSLRs, his photos were awesome.

I mean come on, a R800 compact camera can outperform most camera phones and be wholly relevant against a DSLR, but there are still going to be people with iPhone 4S and Galaxy SII/IIIs complaining about being outclassed by DSLRs? That's just being petty.
 
I was dealing with a guy that had advertised his gear on outdoorphotos not too long ago regarding a Canon 5D he was selling. He tried to convince me that 116k actuations on the thing was low and that the shutter mechanism is rated for 250k shots (which no Canon camera has ever been rated for), and that 5Ds frequently go well beyond that mark.

My offer to him was based on the assumption that within a relatively short space of time after buying the camera, I was highly likely to have to replace its shutter box, which is a R1.5k+ job.

In other words, research what you're making an offer on beforehand, make sure it's what you need and make sure you know what to look for and what questions to ask before committing to a purchase.


Fully agree.

And if in doubt, ask. I'm sure I'm speaking on behalf of all other ODP'ers and photographers (or in my case, Person With Camera), but we will definitely help if asked.
 
Fasman,

https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalRevCom/videos?query=cheap+camera

Go look at these videos.
These are professional photographers that know how to take photos of the things they're used to taking photos of and that are consequently able to take better photos than most, if not all of us that entered the latest photography competition, without having to use DSLRs.

They find ways to make the tools they have work for them, not against them. I linked to these videos earlier already, but I'd wager virtually nobody actually ended up going to watch them.
 
I can't argue with nanonyous anymore as he keeps complimenting my photos. Thanks, nanonyous. Pity neither of us made the bloody final ten... :)
 
I was dealing with a guy that had advertised his gear on outdoorphotos not too long ago regarding a Canon 5D he was selling. He tried to convince me that 116k actuations on the thing was low and that the shutter mechanism is rated for 250k shots (which no Canon camera has ever been rated for), and that 5Ds frequently go well beyond that mark.

Actually, the 1Dmk3, 1Dsmk3, and 1Dmk4 are rated to 300,000 and the new 1Dx 400,000. The 5Dmk2 and 3 are both rated to 150,000 but the first gen only to 100,000.
 
Not going to respond to everything as were just going around in circles.

Now, for the potential of cellphone cameras - again. ClintZA. He submitted photos that were perfectly within the limitations of his phone's camera and compared to the vast majority of the other submissions, even those from DSLRs, his photos were awesome.

Finally you posted something I could agree with his pictures should have been in the top 10, especially considering the fact that they asked us to state what we were using, but instead what we got was 8x DSLRs 1x Iphone and 1x Bridge camera , a far cry of what the competition should have represented under the circumstances ,but sitting down going trough the entries there are some that really should have gotten in the top 10 but didnt due to HW limitations, and its upsetting when people try and tell me they dont exist, and its all about skill.

I know my pics sucked, I entered for fun, and mostly in the hopes that some will visit my deviant art page(hence I posted the links), but what sucks even more is seeing some great talent who could really benefit from a proper DSLR getting overlooked.
 
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