Delaware Beach Life magazine invites you to enter its second annual Photo Contest for amateur photographers. Photos must capture life in coastal Delaware. Categories are:

• People
• Nature
• Action

A trio of judges will evaluate entries based on creativity, originality and technical proficiency.

Winners will be announced in the October 2008 issue of Delaware Beach Life. The top three photographs in each category will be featured in that issue and online at www.delawarebeachlife.com

For more information, e-mail photocontest@delawarebeachlife.com.

HOW TO ENTER:
Photographers may submit up to three entries per category. Only photographic prints may be submitted. (No digital submissions.)

All submissions must be mailed to Delaware Beach Life, ATTN: Photo Contest, P.O. Box 417 Rehoboth Beach DE 19971.

A completed entry form must accompany EACH entry. Entry forms are available online by clicking here.

Entries must be postmarked by June 1, 2008.

RULES:
There is no entry fee or any other cost to enter.

Entries will not be returned.

Photos must have a coastal theme. Images may be color, black-and-white or digitally altered, but will not be judged separately.

Entrants must be amateur photographers, 16 years of age or older. Those who make less than 50 percent of their income from photography are considered amateurs.

Professional photographers (those who earn 50 percent or more of their income from photography) are not eligible to participate — nor are Delaware Beach Life contributors or contractors, or their family members.

Entrant must be the photographer who shot the submitted photographs. Entrants must have the consent of all people in the submitted images; winners will be required to provide signed model releases for all recognizable people in the published photographs.

Previously published photographs are not eligible.

Delaware Beach Life magazine is not responsible for any submitted materials. Delaware Beach Life magazine reserves the right to disqualify photographs deemed unsuitable.

Entrants agree that Delaware Beach Life may use all submissions for contest-related publishing or marketing purposes, but entrants retain all other rights to the use of their images. Photographers will be credited appropriately.

Entries that do not comply with contest rules will be disqualified.

JUDGING:
Entries will be judged according to the overall quality of the photograph, specifically subject matter, composition of the image, exposure, color and focus.

Judges’ decisions will be final.

Each category may have a first-, second- and third-place winner. Honorable mentions may be granted at the judges’ discretion. Winners will be notified by e-mail or phone.

Winners will receive prizes to be announced later.

TECHNICAL DETAILS:
Submitted prints must be no larger than 8 inches by 10 inches. Photographs must not be matted, framed or mounted.

Slides will not be accepted.

DOWNLOAD THE 2008 ENTRY FORM HERE

Past Winners and judges’ comments
(Click for larger images)
 

PEOPLE People, 1st Place Debora Kolcun, Leesburg, Va. A man walks with three dogs on the beach in Fenwick Island State Park. The judges liked how the minimal subject matter, the foggy backdrop, the sepia tone and the unusual cropping worked together to create a mood in the image.

NATURE Nature, 1st Place Chester Poslusny, Lewes “There’s been a thousand pictures of the towers, but not one like this,” said judge Al Danegger of this photograph taken with a Nikon Coolpix camera and an infrared filter.

ACTION Action, 1st Place Bea Miltenberger, Lewes Miltenberger caught this surfer taking a spill in Rehoboth with a Minolta Maxxum 7D and a 400 mm lens. This photograph had the most action of any in the category.

     For examples, click here
Making, not just taking, winning photographs
Successful photographers follow the advice of legendary nature photographer Ansel Adams that “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

The judges in the first Delaware Beach Life photo contest noticed that many entries had promise, but for one reason or another, fell a little short of prizewinner status.

So, here — with comments from the judges and permission from the photographers who let us use their entries as examples — we offer some tips on how to make a great photograph. (See the images on the following pages for more examples.)

One of the most common suggestions the judges offered was that photographers should consider cropping their raw images to improve composition. Judge Kevin Fleming, Delaware Beach Life’s main photographer, often said, “There’s a picture in that picture,” meaning that the subject that would have been engaging was lost amid a lot of “dead space” or uninteresting content, or was placed dead-center in a picture. Such cropping could be accomplished simply by getting out the scissors and cutting off the unimportant visual content, but it can also be achieved with digital photo-editing software that so many photographers are now using.

Such software can also provide a number of basic editing tools that the judges said would have elevated the quality of some of the contest entries. They suggested that photographers learn how to adjust the light and dark areas of an image, as well as how to sharpen it (because digital images are inherently soft). Photographers can also improve their images by tweaking the color saturation and color balance — for example, reducing excess blue in a picture taken on an overcast day.

Of course, it’s very easy to go overboard with digital effects, causing the image to go from one extreme (a raw, unedited snapshot) to the other (a highly altered fake-looking image). The judges’ advice was to use digital software carefully, and “with good taste,” as judge Al Danegger said.

Danegger, a photographer who retired after teaching photojournalism at the University of Maryland for 37 years, also suggested that photographers take the time to shoot a lot of images of an appealing subject, and from more than one angle. “Professional photographers will take many, many rolls of film for just one picture. This is not a matter of dumb luck as some people think, but picking the best out of many very good pictures,” he said.
And those best pictures overcome another hurdle that faces every photographer: avoiding the cliche. This is a common problem in beautiful coastal Delaware, where stunning sunsets, eye-catching lighthouses and gorgeous beach scenes are difficult to resist. But if the goal is to create prizewinning images, not just snapshots for the vacation album, the photographer has to try to capture those common scenes in an uncommon way. As Danegger said about the winner in the nature category on page 53 (a picture of a World War II tower), “There’s been a thousand pictures of the towers, but not one like this.”

Because fully automatic high-quality cameras are the norm today, people looking at prizewinning photographs sometimes say, “Gee, I could have taken that.” But it’s not as easy as it may seem — as Danegger said, echoing Ansel Adams’ advice, “You have to make the picture.”

But all these tips aside, Adams had another principle that suggests that there must be something less technical and more mysterious about the art: “There are no rules for good photographs, only good photographs.”
The Delaware Beach Life staff and contest judges thank the photographers who allowed us to use their images as examples here and on the following pages, and we hope these suggestions help you capture the beauty of coastal Delaware that we celebrate in every issue of Delaware Beach Life. We look forward to seeing the results in our 2008 photo contest!