Photography worlds

A great morale booster is to win or even place in a highly regarded competition. Many professional photographers today have competitions to thank for getting them started on the road to a successful career.

Entering and winning photographic competitions can be a highly lucrative business if you take it seriously. Every year photography magazines alone give away many thousands of pounds/dollars worth of prizes. If you add that to the prizes offered by other magazines and organizations the figure is well into six figures, and someone has to win.

Here are ten secrets to success:

1. Read the rules! There is no point putting lots of effort into shooting an entry if it doesn’t fit the brief.
2. Come up with something original, so it stands out, and only enter your best work.
3. You may ignore your first ideas, though, because they’re probably too obvious, and wait until you feel you have something really original.
4. Only enter competitions that appeal to you, so you have a passion for the subject.
5. Shoot pictures specifically for a competition and start working on ideas as far in advance as possible.
6. Use impact. Here are a few simple forms of impact that work well at catching the eye — colour, shape, expression and humour.
7. Your images should be well exposed, composed and in focus.
8. Be original. Try to find something that no-one else would think of submitting.
9. Keep going. With some of the photography magazines you can enter competitions that are spread over several months, so if you flop in one category you have the chance to catch up in subsequent months and still clinch the overall prize.
10. Be diverse. You may stand a better chance of victory if you enter photo competitions run by non-photographic magazines, simply because the standard of entry tends to be lower. So always keep an eye out for them.

Rules To Watch Out For!

Most competitions are honourable. That is they seek to improve the standard of photography by giving prizes and/or recognition to photographers. For that reason, rules often contain a clause regarding the use of the winning photographs, such as displaying the winning pictures without further payment to the photographer. Please note the part that says winning pictures. Winning photographers are usually awarded a material prize as payment-in-kind for the use of the picture in a limited fashion. This should not affect © copyright which should always remain with the photographer.

Avoid competitions where you may lose copyright of your images. Fortunately these are few and far between but mistakes have been made in the past. The use of pictures submitted to competitions can lead to exploitation of photographers by some organisers. This is because all too often competitions may have rules that include phrases like “…we reserve the right to use ALL images submitted…” If an image isn’t good enough to win a prize but is good enough to be used to promote the competition or any other use by the competition organisers then the photographer should be paid for use of the image! This may only be a token amount but it should be paid and copyright of the image acknowledged to the photographer.

Enter some competitions and you stand a good chance of making a name for yourself and winning some great prizes. Good luck!

1. Camera Stability.

You will be taking long exposures, and any camera motion could impact the quality of the image. Try to utilize a monopod or stabilize the camera on the back of a theater seat. Do not hold the camera in front of you without support.

Some cameras and lenses have stabilization features which help, but will not be able to compensate for large movements in the camera. If you have an SLR, you may want to tuck your elbow into your belly, relax, hold your breath and gently press the shutter button.

2. Equipment.

A digital SLR with a fast (2.8 or better) lens and the ability to capture images cleanly at high sensitivity is best. If you are using a point and shoot, you may have some challenges in getting clean images in a dark room.

3. Flash Off.

Most indoor settings that allow photography specifically state “no flash photography”. In many cases, you’ll just ruin the existing lighting, distract the other viewers and get yourself ejected from the event. Also, from seating distance and angle, many on-camera flashes will be largely ineffective.4. Exposure parameters. You will generally need to set your camera for high ISO or sensitivity (800 to 1600, some newer cameras will go to 3200 or more), low shutter speed (depends on your subject), and wide open F-stop (2.8 to 4.0). For those of you with point and shoot cameras, there may be a “night mode” or other preset which will attempt to deal with these conditions.

4. Shutter Speed.

Integral to the exposure parameters above, you’ll need to set a preferred shutter speed for the activity being photographed. Indoor sports events are often well lit, but you’ll still want to stop motion at 1/120 or faster speed. Indoor dance performances may be much darker, but also require at least 1/60 to 1/100 to stop motion.

Speeches and plays may have less motion, so you may be able to drop below 1/60. For images of still items such as museums, you can afford to drop to a low speed to get a better exposure at higher f-stop or lower sensitivity. Just remember that low shutter speed amplifies the need for camera stability.

6. Underexposing.

Sometimes, to get the right shutter speed, you may not have enough sensitivity and aperture to get a good exposure. Instead of lowering the shutter and getting a guaranteed blurry image, keep the shutter where you need and underexpose the image. In your image editor, you can push the exposure a couple of stops and get a good image, even though it looked too dark on the camera preview.

7. White Balance.

Getting this right in the camera will save you time. Many SLR’s have a white balance custom fuction, where you photograph a white or gray image and tell the camera to use that for your white reference. If you can’t do that, try the canned settings on the camera and review the playback of samples to see the best playback of color tones to the actual room colors. Or, you can shoot RAW and fix it at import.

8. Focus.

Often cameras will have trouble focusing in dark settings. You may want to switch to manual focus, compose a test shot at the same distance to your subject, playback and zoom in the image to verify crisp focus on your subject. Then you’ll avoid the “hunting” and missed focus of your images when the action starts.

9. Post Processing.

I already mentioned pushing dark images and adjusting white balance. Another good tool for dark image editing is noise reduction. When you shoot at high ISO, you often get digital noise on the image. Running a noise reduction will remove some of that noise, but at the expense of image detail or sharpness. You’ll have to weigh the amount and benefits of noise reduction in your case.

Please make sure that you don’t take photos where you are not allowed, but given permission and these techniques, you can take some great indoor images in dark settings!

By John Huegel