Leica Users' Group Photography Contest
Description and official rules

(Last updated 1 December 2006)

The Leica Users' Group, one of the oldest online communities in the world (founded in 1992), now sponsors and operates a monthly photography contest. This page explains the nature of that contest and states the rules.

While we do often talk about our cameras and associated gear, we also like to take them off the shelf and use them on occasion. The purpose of this contest is to sucker people into taking and displaying more good pictures. We hope that all of us can learn from studying those pictures and peoples' reactions to them.

The LUG is not a democracy. The listowner, Brian Reid, makes the rules. He listened to the discussion about the contest, and from that discussion formulated these rules. If you want to talk about any of them, do it on-list and not in private mail. The whole group should get the opportunity to participate. Our notion of rulemaking was heavily influenced by Calvinball.

How to participate

To participate you must have some way of making digital images that involves a lens, you must register with our contest website (this is quite independent of being subscribed to the LUG), and you must be clever enough with computers and documentation to figure out how to use the image-upload features of that contest website.

Judges

There will be a cabal of judges. Their identities will be kept secret unless one of them drinks too much Lagavulin in a bar somewhere and blabs the names. The LUG listowner, despot that he is, makes all of the decisions of who the judges are, but does listen to advice and reason. If you have agreed to be a judge, you must register, because the judging mechanism only works if you're logged in as a registered user. Here are the instructions for judges.

Contest rules

There will be one contest each month. It will open as soon as the listowner creates the online album to hold the entries, and it will close at midnight GMT on the last day of the month. Each month's contest has a theme, though there is no absolute requirement that your entry adhere to the theme. (Remember: our notion of rulemaking was heavily influenced by Calvinball.)

In order to submit an entry to the contest you must register as a user of the contest database (there are places to click on the contest website) and you must be known to the LUG community. The easiest way to become known to the LUG community is to subscribe to the LUG and say something. We recognize that not everyone has the stamina to remain subscribed for long periods, so we don't require that you be a LUG subscriber, but if you register with the contest website and submit an entry and someone asks the question "Who is that Ted Grant fellow?" and no one knows the answer, then we'll probably retaliate by subscribing you to the LUG, or at least asking you to subscribe.

You may enter as many as five photographs in any one month's contest. If you enter more than five, the contest administrator will choose which ones to disqualify and remove.

Entries are anonymous and your equipment is anonymous. That means that when you enter, we don't want to know who you are and we don't want to know what kind of a camera you used. If you don't own any Leica equipment, never have, don't want any, and can't levitate, we'll probably make fun of you in public if you win a monthly contest. Since we've heard that Leica cameras enable better pictures, we naturally expect that entries produced with Leica cameras and/or lenses will be better than the other entries and that the judges will sense this and will prefer the photographs taken with Leica cameras or lenses. However, if we catch you using a webcam, a camera phone, or a Holga, we will banish you from further competition pending suitable penance.

After each contest closes and the winners are announced, the names of the photographers and the technical data will be revealed. This means that if you browse through back issues of the contest, you'll be able to see who the photographers were and what gear they used, but if you look through the current (open) contest submissions, you won't.

Do not submit images bigger than 5MB. You may submit in any imaginable format, though since these pictures will be viewed online, it's probably best to stick to 8 bit JPEG, the vanilla ice cream of image formats.

If you are a registered user of the contest website, you are encouraged to submit comments or numeric ratings for all of the entries. The judges reserve the right to be influenced by those comments and ratings, but they also reserve the right to ignore them.

Prizes

There might or might not be prizes. Your primary reward will be to have your name forever enshrined in our database, and thus the databases of Yahoo and Google and AOL and A9 and MSN, as the winner of a photography contest. When your grandchildren type "Leica photography contest winner" into a search engine someday, they might see your name. As the contest matures, we will refine the notion of prizes.

Image preparation guidelines

When you upload an image to the contest website, the web-server software will convert your image into the size and format that it needs. The conversion is done by decent-quality software (gd or ImageMagick, depending on the format that you upload) and it does not intentionally reduce the quality of your image. But if you are anxious about absolute control over quality, you might want to upload an image that will not be further processed when it gets there. If you want control over the entire image processing pipeline, make your image a JPEG, using and tagged with sRGB color, that fits inside a 640x640 pixel box. You can delete any image that you upload, so it's safe to experiment.