Photo Essay Competition - sign up period.
 

This is the first of (hopefully) many WPF Photo Essay Competitions.

The competition is for the best 'photo essay' as will be judged by popular vote. This is the definition of a photo essay that we will use:

A photo essay (or "photographic essay") is a set or series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. A photo essay will often show pictures in deep emotional stages. Photo essays range from purely photographic works to photographs with captions or small notes to full text essays with a few or many accompanying photographs. Photo essays can be sequential in nature, intended to be viewed in a particular order, or they may consist of non-ordered photographs which may be viewed all at once or in an order chosen by the viewer. All photo essays are collections of photographs, but not all collections of photographs are photo essays. Photo essays often address a certain issue or attempt to capture the character of places and events.

All completed entries need to be posted in this thread by midnight GMT on September 1st, 2010.

Entries are to be submitted as either Word documents (.doc only), OpenDocument format (.odt) or Adobe PDF (.pdf). A minimum of text explaining each photograph is expected.

Any amount of text, subtitles, formatting etc is permitted, as is use of Photoshop and/or other photo editing software. It goes without saying that the photos and text should be your own work only.

Could all participants indicate they will be taking part by posting a brief note in this thread. At this point the specific subject you plan to cover does not need to be specified, merely if you will submit an entry or not.

Some excellent inspiration available here: http://www.coldtype.net/photo.html

Have fun!

I will take part, although my original idea does not exactly fit the theme of telling a story or showing emotion.

Thank you for instigating the discussion and organising this competition.

Obviously I will submit a photo essay myself ;-)

I'd like to have a go.....even though I'm not quite sure yet what it is exactly..:-)

Sharon

An interesting and innovative idea. I will certainly give it a go.

Im in. Not a clue what will happen, Im like Shaz4 dont know what Im doing but will learn.
Good luck everyone.

I cant promise.....as I am so busy, but i will do my best...:)

Thread now "stickied". I suggest that someone decides on a minimum number of pictures to be included in each essay portfolio.

That's a good idea yelvertoft, I think 5 should be the minimum number of pictures.

Comments and questions
 

1 Number of photos in the essay: I do not see that there should be any limit, upper or lower. A single photo can not be a photo essay, but a story can be created with 2 or more photos. Leave the number of photos open to the skill of the competitors.
2 Where will the competition entry files physically reside. In attachments to these messages, .odt's can not be uploaded, and .doc and .pdf files allowed are too small. Will the entry files be located on the entrants own web sites, and accessed via a link?
3 Why not allow .html entries as well as .doc .odt .pdf

Thanks for chipping in Azimbern. Regarding to where the files will go, each entrant will make an account on Scribd, a site that hosts documents, with a social feature as well. Alternatively Google Docs will also host and share documents. Basically we need a link that can be accessed by any member, free of charge, forever. HTML is a good idea, hadn't thought about it, that's allowed too. The number of photos per essay is up to the creator really, if they feel they can do the job with less than 5 then I guess it's acceptable. Certainly no upper limit at all.

WPF allows attachments in Word format, as well as many other forms. The file sizes are perfectly generous for a photo essay - no-one is going to be writing a novel. I see no need to go around using other file hosting sites.

The essay could be written as a post in the thread, erm, just like this text I've just written. Or is that a bit too obvious? ;)

20091213_valdor_01.doc:
Your file of 92.5 KB bytes exceeds the forum's limit of 19.5 KB for this filetype.

This is a message that "manage attachments" returned when I tried to upload a file as a test. The file contained 18 kb of text and the balance was of one image only. Quite clearly photo essays can not be uploaded via this route. Am I missing something????????

I think you are.

Keep the text of the essay as a post in the thread, add your images as attachments to the thread post. Do not embed your images into a word document, that is a sure-fire way to have enormous word docs very quickly.

To create a photo essay in .doc or .odt or .pdf or .html is one thing. To try and create and present a photo essay as a thread in wpf would be like trying to write War and Peace while wearing a straight jacket.

I have to agree with Azimbern here. If you look at the essays in the link I posted in the first post they use quite a lot of complex formatting, tex placed on pictures etc.

There isn't a problem with using Scribd to host the finished files, membership there is fast, easy and free and it preserves all the formatting that you'd have in your PDF, .doc or whatever. If everyone posts the link to their Scribd document on the forum at the end of the competition we should be fine.

Sorry folks, in my old fashioned way a photographic essay has a minimum of text - No more than 100 or 200 words allowed for the whole thing no matter how many pictures - It's meant to be a photographic essay - the pictures tell the story. The forum caters for that quite easily I think. If I have to worry about HTML, PDF, IBD then I'll be giving this competition a miss, and as for posting essays somewhere else and having to go there to see and read them.... :mad:

OK here's what I think we should do.

We'll allow both ways. If you want to be like Andy and go for a minimum of text and no formatting - I understand the appeal - then go ahead and post photos as attachments, with text as a regular post. In fact I think I might do that myself ;-)

If you want to have higher-level formatting like Azimbern then make your doc in one of the approved format, upload to Scribd and post the link here.

It's not really about a battle of what photographic essays should look like, as long as we can see and read everything the way you want us to then it's fine.

NO advantage or disadvantage will be given to either method, of course.

You can of course, also embed you pictures directly in the text of the post, as we do on the POTW announcement.

Does the photographic essay have to be based on work what we have personally done or can it be based on a more famous photographer?

Reason why I ask this is becasue I have wrote up an essay quite a while a go for a course course that I did. I think some of the points in it are quite though provoking...

Just thought I'd check.

Hi there Richard

The essay has to contain photographs that are entirely your own work. You can easily say you have been inspired by a more famous photographer but all the photos and text have to be entirely your own.

Alex

I'm off to Greece for the best part of the summer and will produce a photo essay about some interesting aspect of the place once I get back. I hope you all enjoy taking pictures for your photo essays!

I'd like to have ago as I've never done a photo essay. Just worried about how to upload the images with text! but I'll worry about that when the time comes.