Competition entries from my perspective

Some feedback on the new submission procedures now that the entry deadline has passed.

In general most people took heed of the guidelines and submitted correctly sized images to the correct address. There were however a few people that sent their submissions to the wrong address or submitted images that were considerably larger than they should have been.  The good news is that as this is the first month that we have a web site and are trying to tighten up on the rules, I have cut people some slack and not rejected anyone’s submissions. The bad news is that this is the last month that I will be doing so.

You might be wondering what it looks like when I receive your submissions.  I receive them to a Gmail account and use a web-based e-mail client to read the e-mails. This allows me to see the size of the images before I download them, meaning I can now easily reject over-sized entries before I waste bandwidth downloading them. Below is a screenshot of one of the entries I received this month with annotations indicating how I can tell that the images are too large

I know that it is sometimes difficult to get your file small enough without reducing the quality too much so I am happy to give a little bit of leeway but files that are 3 or 11 times as large as they should be are unacceptable and will be rejected in future and you will be disappointed to sit through the competition, only to realise that one or more of your entries was not accepted.