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Calendar Photography Competition
Posted on Monday, June 20 @ 11:49:37 EDT by Administrator |
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We are launching a photography competition and cordially invite you to participate.
We want to produce a WhiteWicca Calendar to launch in October, ready for the coming year.
The format of the calendar will be A4 size pages with a picture for each month and then the usual date squares with information about the Sabbats, moon phases and other useful things. Because we're such an international group, it wouldn't be fair to have pictures that are exclusively UK, and it wouldn't show the wonderful diversity there is on this lovely planet.
The pictures you submit to the competition will be used in the calendar and entry to the competition implies implicit and explicit agreement on your part for the images to be used with no fee, royalty or other charge for the benefit of WhiteWicca. Any profit will be used for competition prizes, licenses, hosting and domain costs and any other cost associated with improving this website.
There will be twelve small prizes for each of the pictures that are selected for the twelve months and an overall prize for the best picture submitted which may be a month picture or may be used as a cover picture. We are in the process of selecting prizes and I'll add these to the forum post and here in the New Item as soon as we've worked out something really worthwhile and that I don't need to take another mortgage to afford (suggestions welcome, please post in the This Site forum).
The closing date for the competition is midnight GMT of 31st August 2005 and judging will be done in the ensuing two weeks. Winners will be announced no later than 23rd September 2005 in the forum and here on the Whitewicca home page.
All pictures that are used in the Whitewicca 2006 calendar will have credits for the photographers, so when submitting your pictures, please let me know how you would like to be credited should your picture be used.
To submit your pictures, please send me a Private Message and I will give you an email address to send the picture(s) to. As each photograph will be a very large file (see the technical blurb below), please submit each picture individually as an email attachment, ensuring it is zipped. In your covering email, please state your user name, the title of the picture, when and where it was taken and the image attributes (if that sounds confusing, read the technical bit and you'll see - it means how many pixels by how many pixels and stuff like that).
Picture format must be .jpg and NOT compressed. Please read the technical blurb below, as professional printing will highlight any deficiencies in the quality of the picture and detract from the image.
Image resolution
Calendar pages are 11" x 8.5" (letter paper, printed landscape orientation). For the best quality, the image is printed at 300 dpi. This means that the minimum number of pixels required is 3300x2550 pixels (8.5 x 300 = 2550, 11 x 300 = 3300).
When an image is uploaded that has fewer pixels, the printer will scale the image up and interpolate (make an educated guess) about what the missing pixels should be. The more an image has to be scaled, the more the printer has to guess, and the worse your picture will look.
TIP: Look at the image zoomed in 4x or 5x and see what the actual pixels look like.
Where do megapixels fit in?
The megapixel specification on your digital camera tells you the maximum number of pixels it can capture in one image. One megapixel equals one million pixels. For example, a two megapixel camera can take a 1600x1200 pixel image (1600 x 1200 = 1.92 million, or roughly 2 megapixels). Printed at 300dpi, this results in a high-quality 5.3" x 4" print. The image will be resized considerably if you put it in your calendar.
Image compression
The second key component is image compression. The greater the image compression the lower the image quality. While high compression saves you space on your memory card, the consequence is that you have lower quality pictures.
Why? The JPEG format removes information from your image in order to reduce the file size. JPEG images use a lossy compression, an image compression algorithm that selectively removes data from the image to make the data file smaller. JPEG takes areas of 8x8 pixels and compresses the information to its lowest common value. But, as discussed in image resolution (above), the page size dictates at least 3300x2550 pixels. So the printer has to interpolate your image, making guesses and inserting the missing pixels until the image is the right size to be printed.
Interpolation is a process that most printers use to smooth the appearance of an image. However, if the interpolation is too great — the image size is increased too much — the results can cause "blockiness," the "jaggies," or "pixelization" in the final print.
IMPORTANT: Use the lowest compression available.
Most digital cameras permit you to select different compression levels: Basic, Fine, and Superfine - or something similar. The "image quality" settings on your camera can be a combination of image size and compression. That is, Fine and Superfine settings might both produce 3000x2300 images, but at different compressions. Read the do!*@*#*!entation that came with your digital camera.
Camera capabilities
Finally if your image has enough resolution, and low compression, there is one last hurdle: your camera. When the camera captures light reflections, it makes a lot of guesses. Planes of solid colour are most subject to this guessing by the camera. This effect becomes more and more noticeable with the less light you have ("graininess" as it's commonly called)
For example, your camera might guess that a large area of white is made up of cyan, purple, and green pixels.
If you got through all the technical stuff, all that remains is for me to wish you all the best of luck, happy snapping and bright blessings. I shall look forward to seeing your pictures!
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