Our next competition will be this Wednesday, April 15, 2015. We will have our Digital competition. You may enter three digital images images.  Submissions are due by Tuesday, April 14, 2015, no later than 5pm.  While we will try to include later entries, they will not be guaranteed.

The theme this month is Environmental Portrait
An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings. By photographing a person in their natural surroundings, it is thought that you will be able to better illuminate their character, and therefore portray the essence of their personality, rather than merely a likeness of their physical features. It is also thought that by photographing a person in their natural surroundings, the subject will be more at ease, and so be more conducive to expressing themselves, as opposed to in a studio, which can be a rather intimidating and artificial experience.

The emphasis should be on creating a portrait that tells the viewer something personal about the subject: their job/hobby/passion/etc. The subject should be engaged, that is they should know that they’re having their photograph taken.

How do you know someone is a teacher/lumberjack/civil engineer or loves bicycling/tying fishing flies/building robots/coaching little league baseball? You can take pictures of people riding their bike to work all day, but those aren’t environmental portraits. But if you sit the little league coach down in the dugout, have him put on his jacket and/or cap, include his whistle, clipboard, and water bottle, frame the shot to include the bench and dugout steps, and engage him in making some photographs, that’s an environmental portrait. Click here for examples of Environmental Portraits.

Competition rules, which include how to prepare your digital entries, are also posted on our website http://arundelcameraclub.org/rules-summary/

Email your digital entries in by Tuesday, at noon. We will confirm receipt of them. Remember that the email address to send your digital entries to is contests@arundelcameraclub.org.

Please send your images as email attachments.

Please resize your images to 1024 pixels on the long side (1024 x ??? or ??? x 1024).

Files should be named according to the following convention:

A class identifier, ‘n’ for novice or ‘u’ for unlimited, should prepend the file name and be followed by an underscore.

The image name should appear next. For multi-word titles, it is helpful to either capitalize the first letter of each word or separate each word with an underscore. Although most mechanisms of uploading/transferring/emailing files handle spaces in titles, this is not universal. If you have problems sending files with space-separated titles, try the methods mentioned above instead.

An underscore and the owner’s first and last initials should follow the title.

Finally, make sure the file extension (.jpg) exists.

Examples: Here are file name samples using the above convention:

    u_BridgeOnTheRiverKwai_cb.jpg

    u_bridge_on_the_river_kwai_cb.jpg

    n_thistitleisveryhardtoread_cb.jpg

    n_some have trouble with this_cb.jpg