Thought since we'd been picking up lots of new members and new entrants, might be a good idea to repost the "rules" and how the contest works :)
Maybe Fearless Leader or Flat can sticky this :)

We don't have many rules..
but here they are

The photo must me taken somewhere in IL, and taken during the contest period.

Winner of the current month Judges the next month, and picks the theme for the following month



For example - Christine won the October sunset contest, so she judged the November contest, and set the theme for December

Hope that was easy enough for our new folks :)

Thanks Gretchen! Now Bob or Flatlander make this a sticky, I have been here a year and entered lots of contest and did not know the photos had to be taken in Illinois, lucky 99.9% of my photos are from here anyway. :D

Heck Harry - Bob set this up two years ago- I'm not even sure I'm correct! You know me - I do good to remember 15 minutes ago LOL

Just throwing out a question - how would folks feel if we went to the winner of the contest picks the theme and judges the next months both?
I'm still thinking about how to add a photo poll .... so members could do the voting and then all the winner would have to do is pick the next moths theme.
We are getting close to the end of the year - so if you have any suggestions on changes etc that we could make to the photo contest post 'em here and maybe we can do an overhaul and start fresh beginning in January :)

The number of photos posted have reduced substantially lately. Would be nice to get more new/amateur postings.
Member voting with anonymous photos would be nice however there are some real pros here so obviously if judged solely on photo quality it would be tough to keep the less outfitted shooters encouraged to keep posting. I like the polling idea but it would be a bit tough to set up.
What if its split into 2 categories.
Advanced and Amateur and have the opposite group vote?
Advanced would not be prize and Amateur could remain with prize.
This would cause 1 group to encourage the opposite group to try harder.
Advanced could be voted on on 15th by the previous months amateur winner.
Amateur would be voted on the 1st by previous months Advanced Winner.
3 winnings in Amateur elevates the shooter to Advanced.

Its just a thought.

I have to agree. I have frequently thought man this is a good pic to enter in the contest only to skip it for a couple of reasons. The biggest is you regular photo people kick butt taking pictures. I really just look at stuff and say I'm taking a pic of that. Not very often either.

The other is that some people can get darn right nasty critical of things here. For goodness sakes I was questioned on a picture because some in it had shed their orange with darkness in the background suggesting maybe we were illegal...:rolleyes: after dark yeah a cpo is going to walk up to someones driveway and ticket them for not having orange on in a photo shoot, or for that matter in the middle of the woods in a creek bed under the same circumstances.

My point is that I love seeing pictures and would like to be involved but figure if I have trepidation than many other ameture/novice camera users would feel the same.

I agree with two contests. One for pros and one for cons....I mean Me.:o

Good ideas guys! I'll work with Bob to see how we can implement some of them.
Chris I understand whre you are coming rom - some previous members really gave me grief and told me that I should not be entering at all - so I took to marking mine non entry for a time just to unruffle their feathers.

The trick will be determining advanced vs amateur; some it's pretty clear, we make $ with our work, have it published etc, but with others it might no be so clear...

Keep up the good ideas coming! I'm sure Bob and George will be happy to accommodate us as best they can!

Sounds real good to me and I sure wish we could set it up so everyone could vote instead of having one person do it because they are the winner of the month before.

Harry I'm still trying to figure out a way to do that..
right now the poll only holds so many enries and it doesn't allow to show the image. I know on a another board I'm on they do an anon poll both the entries and the voting and only the admin knows - but I think that's on a zeta board... surely george can help us get something figured out by the first of the year :) Ideas techy people?