Photography contests are a double edged sword: on one hand is the thrill of pitting your best work against others in a juried competition and the positive rewards that can bring, on the other are the commercial interests of the organization running the contest (you pay them to give away your photos for their use!), and that deflated feeling if your pictures don’t do well. I don’t enter many contests preferring instead to create my pictures simply because I love to do it and don’t worry too much about the judgements of others.
That being said, this year I earned reasonable results in 2 contests. The first is the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and this picture of a Lion’s Mane jellyfish made it to the final round of judging (out of 50,000 entries):
The second contest is the annual Kolor Panorama contest in which photographers submit images in the panoramic format for inclusion in their best of the year book. Kolor is a French software company that produces image stitching programs and I use their Auto Pano Pro software to stitch together my panoramas. This year 2 euros from the sale of each book gets donated to the World Wildlife Fund. Two of my images are included in this year’s book. You can find out more about the book and contest here.
