ICB Photography Competition 2008

Information on Preparing Entries

 

General  Comments

The main requirement for a photographic competition is that the image should have visual impact. This is a combination of subjective and objective parameters.

Generally speaking, from an objective view, the image should be sharp and and well exposed unless the intention is to have "blurry" or "moody".

Subject matter and composition are a lot more subjective but there are some general pointers to composing photographs harmoniously.
Basic Overview Here or Another Site

For the ICB competition, not only do you need an excellent visual image, it has to communicate science - your science. The image itself AND the 50-100 word descrption that you write to accompany it, should together communicate something about the science that you do that will be interesting to both scientists and non scientists alike.

Last year's winner for example, "Goanna 32", was not only a very powerfull image in its own right, but became the winner by virtue of the text description, which was not only concise, interesting and scientifically informative, but also incredibly poignant and thought provoking.

 

Click this Link for goanna32 web page

 

Preparing Images for the Competition

 

Technical Quality of Image

As mentioned above images should be sharp and well exposed. Up to a point, remedial work can be done in image editing programs to rescue images, but it only really works on images that are slightly misexposed. Lack of critical sharpness can be rescued but obvious blur or camerashake cannot, and is readily apparent to the trained judging eye.

Having said that, one of last year's prizewinners by Tonia Schwartz, was a 640 x 480 px video capture of pretty poor quality. It was however worth rescuing to an acceptable size (even with obviously visible artefacts) because it was such an unusual and cleverly thought out image. The same applied to the underwater video capture of the shark in Jervis Bay. A very poor image technically, but very interesting and original and well worth having in the competition.

 

Scanning

Books are written about scanning, so this is beyond the scope of this brief guide.

1. Scan to the final size of the desired print. In the scanner settings, set the final resolution to be 300 and the sizeof the short side to be no more than 20cm - so it will print onto and A4 sheet of paper.

2. If the scanner's resolution is quoted at 3200x3200, set that as your resolution and scan the slide at 100% of its size, then upscale as in that guide.

 

Preparing Digital File

300dpi JPEG at approximately A4 size (or larger if you can)

See this guide for more>>

Preparing the digital images at this size and resolution will enable them to be printed out for judging by the same good printer, so that the quality of the printer you have access to, should not be a limiting factor.

You can of course print your own images if you wish to. They should be approiximately A4 size for the purpose of judging. IF you do this, can we ALSO have the image as a 300dpi digital file, as it saves considerable amounts of time in preparing the website and the calendar.

We intend to exhibit a selection of the entries in a public gallery next year, and for this the final print size will be at least A3. If you have the time, it would help us a lot if you could make an image file or print of that size available.

 

 

We look forward to seeing this years entries. Good Luck!

All general enquiries and entries to: Julie Wright

A.Prof Sharon Robinson
Andrew Netherwood