It looks as though I may have jumped the gun last week with my bold declaration of having already earned $20,000 in 24 hours in photo competitions. For starters I read the terms and conditions of the Whiskas competition and to my dismay the whole thing is nothing more than a glorified exercise in social marketing!! To be in the running for the $10,000 first prize you have to be among the top 10 in votes received from visitors to the site, from there the judging panel decides the winning photo and awards the big cash prize. The problem with this, as I see it, is the cats with the most votes are the ones whose owners spend countless hours every day commenting on other cats and organising a vote-for-vote arrangement with fellow entrants doing the same thing, it’s got nothing to do with having a cute cat or a nice photo. The system is also fundamentally flawed because it’s impossible for late entries to feature in the final selection; I’m already 8,000 votes behind the leader, a gulf which can’t be breached within the remaining time. For these reasons I have elected NOT TO ENTER MY PHOTO in this competition which brings my potential earnings down to $10,000.
(Also, as Hash pointed out in last week’s comments, Isobel is probably too beautiful and classy for a common cat food such as Whiskas, she’s really more suited to promoting high end cat food. Perhaps I’ll send a speculative email to Dine….)
So, with my earning potential already cut in half I decided to focus my attention to the Art of Nature. Now this is a real photo competition, judged by a panel of experts, but as I read through the T’s & C’s I realised that in order to win the full $10,000 I will need to win all 5 categories, and in order to win all 5 categories I’ll need to actually have eligible photos to submit for all 5 categories. As tempted as I was to enter Gary the Galah and pretend the photo was taken in a national park I decided my integrity wouldn’t allow it, to this end I made my way down to Newland Head Conservation Park at Waitpinga on Sunday to capture some classic Australian fauna and maybe take some breath taking coastal shots for the Wild Places category.
As luck would have it we took a wrong turn early and accidentally did the wrong walk, you know, the one that didn’t have any coastal sections at all. This wasn’t a problem though, because instead of rugged cliffs and pounding waves we saw KANGAROOS!! I just never get tired of these things, I don’t know if it’s because I’ve spent so much time out of Australia in recent years and now subconsciously link them with a misguided sense of patriotism, but I’m totally besotted with these gentle marsupials that get from point A to point B by jumping. Unfortunately I was out of luck in the echidna department, and the wombats and platypi were playing hide and seek (and winning) but the walk was a massive success nonetheless.
I probably won’t be winning anything for my whale photos, but it was still cool to see them way out at sea. I think I actually prefer my shots of the whale watchers!
For the photographers out there I took this week’s photos with my Canon 70-200 while last week’s were taken with the Canon 24-70. Comparing the plant shots over the 2 weeks I think I definitely prefer last week’s collection, the problem with the 70-200 at 2.8 on the full frame 5D mk II is that the depth of field is so incredibly small it’s really hard to get most of the subject in focus with a nicely blurred background. The wider angle of the 24-70 makes for a more pleasing balance of in focus and out of focus areas in my opinion. I tried experimenting with different apertures on the 70-200 but the backgrounds were always too busy for my liking so I resorted to blurring them with some f/2.8.
If you didn’t manage to get out there this weekend then don’t despair, the entry date has now been extended by a couple of weeks until the 6th of August – make sure you grab your camera, grab a friend and head out for a photography themed bush walk. Just don’t be expecting to win $10,000 – my name’s already written all over it.
