Topic: British Landscape Photography Contest

[gothamtomato]

I thought some people here might be interested in this http://www.take-a-view.co.uk/

[Paul Mitchell]

It's a bit of a lottery simply by the sheer amount of submissions but some of the prizes are worth having. I did quite well last year winning the Sunday Times Magazine Choice Award http://www.take-a-view.co.uk/2013_winners.htm Can't post the image as it was one of those you know whats... 

[gothamtomato]

I can't speak for how this contest is judged, but I recently helped judge a photo contest that had over 47,000 entries and we looked at every single image and judged in rounds. It wasn't a lottery.

[Paul Mitchell]

Not all competitions are lotteries I'm sure and I apologise for being so cynical.

TAV regularly attracts 100k of images which have to go through a preliminary round before being whittled down to about 1k. The preliminary rounds are judged by eminent photo professionals but they still have to look through on average 20k of images each in a few days. One of the previous years judges was a friend of mine and he told me that there's no time to look for subtlety and consequently favours high impact images.

I have also known people that have had the same images rejected one year and accepted the next (and indeed won a major prize!).

TAV is a very well run and respected competition but (like other competitions) the final selection can leave one perplexed sometimes. The major source of income from this competition is made from the sale of the book and high impact images sell books!

Paul

[KevinAllan]

I did quite well last year winning the Sunday Times Magazine Choice Award http://www.take-a-view.co.uk/2013_winners.htm Can't post the image as it was one of those you know whats... 

Your success was well deserved Paul but I can't help feeling that it is the organisers who "do well" every year, with entry fees of £10 plus paid in advance. Also the "two suns appear over Holy Island but judges fail to notice" affair dented their respect.