The world is still learning to deal with COVID-19 and many places are enacting various levels of lock down or quarantine. Obviously, this can make it difficult to get out and take pictures. I’ve written about some ideas for photographing at home, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not for everyone. Instead of shooting new photos, why not put your existing images to work? I’m talking about submitting to photo contests.
Photo Contests
Entering photo contests can be scary at first, but can be very rewarding seeing how your work compares to your peers. More importantly, in my opinion, entering contests gives you a chance to see other works for inspiration and to see what kinds of photos people enjoy. This part of peer review can help you learn from others and give you new ideas.
When considering entering contests, I feel the goal is use it as a learning experience as well as a tool to gauge your skill level. Don’t feel bad or self-conscious if you don’t win. There’s 1 prize and thousands of entrants. Winning should be an after thought. Instead, look at the contest themes and criteria as ideas for future shoots. Look at work already submitted for ideas in improving your own work. If possible, study the entrants with the most votes to see why they’re winning and learn to apply those techniques into your own work. Ultimately, use contests as a learning tool.
So where do you begin? Start by looking for local photo contests hosted by local clubs, schools or colleges, or the town. Be cautious of most photo contests, especially those that aren’t local. Many of them write their terms of service agreements in a way that gives the company behind the contest all rights, or at least free usage, of any photo you submit. These contests collect thousands of photos from contestants and re-sell them elsewhere for marketing purposes. Always read the agreements and pay careful attention to copyright and ownership clauses. Keep in mind that there must be some legal content giving the company permission to use the work submitted to some degree, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to display your work for voting or to announce it as a winner.
If you want to participate in contests in app form, I have a few recommendations and none I particularly love. Of these recommendations are: Gurushots and Canon RAISE.
Gurushots - https://gurushots.com/
Follow me - https://gurushots.com/gk1984
I was a fairly early member of Gurushots, so I’ve seen how this company has grown and changed to get where they are now. When I first joined, I was honestly excited and happy to participate. Today, I’m ready to quit. I don’t want to tell my readers to avoid Gurushots because it does offer plenty others don’t and the platform may still appeal to many.
So what is Gurushots? It’s a website and app which focuses on rapid, peer-voted, photo contests. However, Gurushots doesn’t quite describe themselves as a photo contest platform, but rather a game. And that distinction between game and contest is very important because contests are generally fair and equal. Games, on the other hand, are meant to take your money and offer incentives to do so, sometimes those incentives shift that equality a little. On the surface, Gurushots is a platform to upload photos, browse contests, and submit those photos to those contests. In order to keep your photos more visible, you need to vote for your peers’ photos. As you vote, your “exposure meter” increases. When your exposure meter is full, your submitted photos remain higher in the list of submitted photos. Over time, your exposure meter decreases as a tool to bring you back to the app and continue voting. I haven’t quite figured out what determines the exposure meter’s rate of decrease, but it doesn’t decrease equally for all contests. It must factor in the number of photos submitted along with the time the contest is open for.
Every game wouldn’t be complete without some ways to get an edge over your opponents and Gurushots is no exception. In contests that let you submit 4 photos, you can “boost” one, which allows that photo to be seen more often by more people and exponentially increase votes. Every contest has a random period to boost a photo for free, but you can use in-app purchases to boost whenever you want. You can also spend a “fill” to maximize your exposure meter without voting. Keys also exist. A key is needed to boost without waiting for it to be available. Contests also lock after a certain amount of time and a key can be used to unlock them again. Finally, you can swap photos you submitted if you feel one might do better than what you’ve submitted. Naturally, earning a key to unlock boosts and locked contests, fills, and swaps are hard to come by for free. Gurushots is quite aggressive at encouraging users to buy these power-ups.
Voting is perhaps the best feature of Gurushots and why I recommend it. While you can’t see how many votes any one photo has or who submitted it while you’re voting, you can see the standings outside of voting as well as how many votes your photos have earned. That means it’s easy to see how you compare to others and you can browse the most voted photos to get ideas to improve yourself. I haven’t seen another photo contest that so cleverly allows you to see how many votes a photo or photographer has in a contest while still keeping voting anonymous and random.
The majority of the contests held by Gurushots offer keys, swaps, and such for prizes. However, once or twice a month, there’s a contest in which the top photographers are displayed in an art gallery for an exhibition. It does require a fee to be shown in the exhibition, but it’s optional. The exhibitions take place in art galleries all over the world. I’ve been digitally featured twice. Gurushots also offers some contests with real prizes, such as a new camera or to be featured on a blog or magazine.
Canon RAISE - https://raise.usa.canon.com/
Follow me - https://raise.usa.canon.com/user/graesen-arnoff
RAISE, by Canon is a little different from Gurushots. It’s much more laid back, less pressure, and perhaps more boring. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth looking at. I prefer the pace of RAISE over Gurushots, for example. I don’t have time to keep my “exposure meter” up on Gurushots all of the time. With RAISE, you build a profile, find photographers to follow, like their work, and enter challenges.
Challenges are RAISE’s version of photo contests. The difference is Canon is using AI to generate the challenges, which I find to be too repetitive and bland, but it works. The challenges define a category and you can submit a single photo to the challenge. Then you and other photographers vote for your favorites. You can vote for as many photos as you like, but only once per photo. At the end of the timer, a winner is selected.
As you reach achievements, such as gaining followers and winning challenges, you increase your level. As far as I’m aware, levels 1-6 are meaningless, but they do give you something to strive for and goals to reach. Supposedly, reaching level 7 grants you access to challenges and contests with prizes. As of writing this, I am still at level 6, so I can’t comment on those yet.