2011 Photo Comp Winners

The 2011 Eat. Drink. Blog. Photography Competition has been a wonderful showcase of some of the best food photography from the Australian food blogging community over the past year. From a large pool of entrants, our judging panel of food photography/industry professionals whittled the submissions down to a selection of 15 finalists, as shown above.

There are two sets of prizes awarded to the best images out of the group of finalists. An IMPACT Award, for the best image as selected by our judging panel. There are also winner and runner-up prizes for the Community Award, as voted by the food blogging community, readers and the general public.

Without further ado, the winners of the 2011 Eat. Drink. Blog. Photography Competition are…

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Photography Competition Closes Today

Just a quick reminder that the Eat. Drink. Blog. 2011 photography competition closes tonight at midnight.

There are a few photos that have been submitted without any info (possibly due to some error). If these are your images, please resubmit your application to ensure that you’re in the running for the competition.

When submitting your images, if you are not redirected to a page indicating your submission was successful, there was likely a problem with your submission e.g. image issue above.

One sure fire way of guaranteeing a failed submission is by not reading the submission guidelines carefully. Please be especially mindful that the images submitted are around or less than 500Kb in size.

To avoid any disappointment, if you are uncertain that submission was successful, please send an email to eatdrinkblogau@gmail.com to follow up on the matter. So long as this email is sent prior to the close of the competition, your submission, even if unsuccessful, will still be considered in the running for the comp.

Lastly, follow the official #eatdrinkblog2011 hashtag and/or @eatdrinkblogau to keep up to date on info regarding the competition. To those that have entered or are about the enter the competition, good luck with your submissions.

Eat. Drink. Blog. 2011 Photography Competition – Update

A long overdue update regarding the Eat. Drink. Blog. 2011 photography competition.

As it was stated in a previous blog post, the organising committee decided on making some changes to improve the nature of the photography competition. We’ve moved away from the photography exhibition and photo prints of last year’s conference and instead directed our efforts to obtaining some seriously cool prizes for the winners of this year’s comp.

The competition will operate in much the same manner as before, though entries for the competition will now close Friday 11th November 2011 (enter the competition). The judging panel will select the top 15 entries as finalists of the competition. From the pool of finalists, two awards will be given – the IMPACT Award, for the best image selected by the judging panel, as well as the Community Award, selected by food blogging peers, readers and the general public.

Prizes

The prizes for each of these awards are:

• IMPACT Award – $1000 VISA gift card, that can be used toward upgrading your camera gear, make the move from your dinky point-and-shoot to a DSLR format, purchase that drool-worthy lens on the top of your wishlist, or buy a studio lighting kit so you can shoot with beautiful light at any hour of the day. Whether it be these options or some other, the choice is entirely yours to make.
• Community Award – A KitchenAid stand mixer, for the serious baker, cook and recipe blogger at heart (model, colour and retail value to be determined).

Judges & Judging Criteria

For the judging panel, a small group of industry professionals that deal with food photography as a part of their career were selected. The judges for the photography competition are:

• Quentin Jones – A veteran photographer who has worked for Fairfax Media for over 25 years, he currently shoots for the Sydney Morning Herald, specialising in food, architecture & lifestyle photography. You can check out his portfolio on his website Inkstain Media.
• He is also the person running the Photography Workshop at the conference.
• Natalie Boog – A professional photographer whose food photos have been published on the cover of Good Living magazine and was the photographer involved with the country food flag images for the World Chef Showcase 2009. She is also the blogger for Seasonal Diners. For more of her portfolio work, check out her professional website.
• Julie Lee – The Managing Editor for Australian Good Taste magazine.

The judging panel will select the finalists, as well as the winner of the IMPACT Award, judging each entry on three main criteria of equal weighting:

1. Technical – This refers to the technical aspects of the image e.g. an appropriate usage of exposure, colour balance, sharpness, depth of field and so forth.
2. Aesthetics – How beautiful and visually pleasing the subject, the composition and other elements of the image are, and how well they work with each other.
3. Creativity – The interesting and unique manner in which the subject and other elements in the image are portrayed, and how the message/story of the image is communicated.

Details regarding the judging of the Community Award will be announced around the time the finalists have been determined. Generally speaking, voting for the Community Award will run over a specified period and the finalist with the most votes for their entry will win the award.

For those of you who may be intimidated by bloggers with professional-level gear while you only use, say, a basic point-and-shoot, please bear in mind that the technical criteria of a photo is but one part out of three judging criteria. Just because you have professional gear, it doesn’t mean that your photos will be aesthetically pleasing or creative, let alone guarantee that you’ll score full marks in the technical area for that matter. Take it from someone who knows!

There’s no cost to enter the competition. So long as you meet the entry criteria on the competition submission page, you may be in with more of a chance than you think.

While this is not a part of the judging criteria nor a condition of entry, to make the most of your submission I’d advise submitting images of sufficiently large resolution within the file size limit of around 500Kb. Something around 500 pixels or greater on the shortest side of the image e.g. 500 x 700, 800 x 600 etc. You don’t have to but it’d be easier to judge an image that can be viewed full screen over one that is the size of a postage stamp.

Change to Conditions

For those of you that have already submitted an entry into the competition, there have been a few minor changes to the competition conditions that you’ll need to be aware of. Check out the Conditions of Entry for the full list of conditions. However, I’ll make note of the main ones below.

Firstly, a condition has been added whereby the winners of the competition (i.e. the IMPACT Award and Community Award) will need to allow the use of their winning entry for media releases regarding the competition. If this is some you do not agree to and wish to withdraw from the competition, please send me an email to eatdrinkblogau@gmail.com to let me know.

Secondly, due to the extension of the closing date for competition entries, it’s been decided to extend the blog post publish date range for valid entries. You can now submit any photos used in blog posts published between the dates of 1st September 2010 through to 27th October 2011.

Lastly, due to the these stated changes, revelation regarding the judging criteria, as well as other minor changes to the entry conditions, prior to the closing date for competition entries, existing entrants are permitted to do the following:

1. Resubmit your entry – In this case, you will need to resubmit you entry in full. Your previously entries will be deleted and replaced by the new one. This also applies to those that have submitted less than 5 images and wish to add more.
2. Withdraw – Send an email to eatdrinkblogau@gmail.com to let us know that you want your entry withdrawn from the competition. There’s no need to state the reason why and we won’t ever to ask for one.
3. Do nothing – Your existing entry will remain in the competition as is.

Finally, a big thanks to our competition partner IMPACT Communication Australia for their generous donation of these fabulous competition prizes. I look forward to seeing your wonderful entries