Calendar thoughts, thread 1

[blueraven95]

Hi everyone! Please bear with me, I know it's long, but it's all pretty important.

After taking everyone's comments into consideration, here is how I would like to run the calendar process this year:

Submission process:
There will be a theme. You will know it soon.

Each person entering will be allowed to submit up to 10 photos, each submitted individually in the full required dimensions/dpi/other technical guidelines, to an email address that I will designate soon. Entries should be submitted with their title and DU name in the subject line. Any entries received after the initial 10 will be immediately disqualified.

I am asking for this type of submission so that we can immediately weed out any photographs that will not be suitable for printing.

on edit: I should have added that I will be the only person to have access to the full-res images (until I send the winners to the admins), and I will delete all of the photos after the contest is over and the calendar has been released.

Judging process:
Judges:
I would like to ask for 3-5 (preferably 5) volunteers to judge the submissions. If you are interested please make sure you will be available during the judging window on the timeline (see below). These people would be ineligible to submit for the calendar, but you would have the my undying gratitude. I do not want to open this up to the entire DU population (and would prefer to keep it with photo people), but if you know a Du'er with impeccable taste, who might be interested, please point them my way. Please PM me if you are interested.

Judging:
I'm sorry in advance, this looks much more complicated than it really is!

I am planning on taking all of the eligible photographs, after weeding out those that do not fit the technical specs, and turning each one into a web-friendly version to send to the judges. The judges will then rate each photograph on a scale of 1-10, on technical and artistic qualities of the photograph, as well as a separate rating of how well it relates to the theme. I will then take those ratings and take the 12 images with the highest rating to use in the calendar. If one photographer happens to have more than one photograph in the top twelve ratings, then I will confer with the judges to choose which one will be chosen, and the next highest rated photograph (ex. if the top photos are rated numbers 1-12, then 13 would take the place of the repeated photographer's photo) will be inserted. In the case of a tie in the ratings, I will send those back to be re-judged, and the highest rated photo will be used.

Calendar order will be determined through conversations between the judges and me. Details will be worked out later. I reserve the right to choose the calendar cover, because I can (gosh darn it!).

I am doing it this way so that each photograph is judged as blindly and fairly as possible on it's own merits, without any influence from other people and as little influence as possible from the other submitted photos. I would still like to have as many people as possible represented, so I am keeping the rule that each photographer can only be represented once (not including the cover).

Estimated Timeline:
Submissions open on or around (depends on how quickly the theme is agreed on) August 1st and accepted through September 7th
Submissions to judges by September 15th
First round of judging done by September 26th
Second round of judging done by October 3rd (if necessary)
Calendar order decided by October 10th
Winners announced and photographs sent to the admins by Oct 24th

That's basically it, of course all normal contest rules apply and I will have all submission details up in a new thread around August 1st. If you are starting to look at pictures to choose for submission, I will have the tech. specs up soon, but you can always look at last year's specifications as a guideline - I doubt they will change much.

Please ask any questions, etc here.

If you have not already seen it, please check out Calendar thoughts, thread 2, which is much, much shorter! :hi:

[Ms. Toad]

1. Just a thought

I understand that last year's voting on a large number of photos in a short period of time lead to poll fatigue - but I think input from more than the 3-5 judges would go a long way toward generating more interest in/ownership of the final product.

I'll admit to not following the earlier threads extremely closely - but I thought the idea of using judges was to narrow the field down for a final vote by the photography forum (or DU GD) - not to replace a popular vote.

Personally, I'm less interested in a resulting perfect calendar (either in matching to a theme or artistic perfection) than I am in the personal connection to creating/selecting a group collection of photographs that ends up being paired with calendar pages so we can enjoy it (and think back on the fun we had creating it) for a year.

[blueraven95]

2. Hi Ms. Toad

I understand your confusion! I am trying to avoid a zillion polls, and I haven't found a satisfactory way to have a more open judging. Honestly, I'm just trying to avoid poll burnout on all sides.

I am still trying to figure out another way to do open judging, that has elements of being closer to a "blind" poll than what we can do on DU. If I can find something that has all the features I want for free or close to free, then I will change things around, and let everyone know right away. Regardless, I still would like to have submissions submitted as outlined above - it would reduce the amount of headaches for me immensely.

If I can't find the right type of polling (and trust me, I'm trying), then I propose we try what is outlined above. This is just for this year and should be treated as a bit of an experiment. If it doesn't work, then we will revamp completely for next year.

:hi: