Hidden
Earth National Caving Conference
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Earth National Caving Conference |
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 List of Competitions |
A summary of the Hidden Earth competitions, with links to further information. |
| Photographic Competition |
A brief introduction to the Photo Salon |
| Photo Salon Special Prizes |
Information about this year's special prizes, which include the Moore Books prize for the best mining photo and the Speleo Technics prize for the best photo of a Speleo Technics product in use |
| Competition Entry Forms |
Here you can download an entry form for the Photo Salon, as well as all the detailed rules and guidelines |
For 2007, in addition to all the usual categories in the Photo Salon, there are three special prizes...
Sponsored by Mike Moore Books, moorebooks.co.uk; a £100 voucher for mining books for the best colour or monochrome print with a mining or man-made underground theme. (£20 of mining books for runner up). As well as mining in the strictest sense, this includes quarrying and other man-made tunnelling activities.
The pictures must be from an abandoned mine or a former industrial underground site (this includes sewers and drains). In all cases the site must not have been in use at the time the photo was taken; the emphasis of the competition is on historical sites. The location of the photo can be anywhere in the world. The competition will be judged by Mike Moore, aided by two further judges to be announced.
The photograph should provide a simple understanding of a particular site; it can show the unique features, such as stoping, mining methods, mining machinery or equipment, mineralisation or some other particular feature. It should not, however, depict wildlife.
Sponsored bySpeleo Technics, manufacturers of high-performance caving lamps and chargers; a single cash prize of £100 for the best colour photo (print, transparency or digital file) of a SpeleoTechnics product in use. The sponsor may use the winning entry for advertising purposes. Up to three entries per person. One prize.
The winning entry will be retained by Speleo Technics for up to six months for the purpose of making a copy or using it in advertising after which it will be returned on request. If the entrant wishes to make a copy of his winning entry before releasing it Speleo Technics may retain the prize money until they receive the photo. Speleo Technics has unrestricted non-exclusive use of the photograph without payment, but copyright is retained by the photographer and a credit to the photographer will be given in any published use. The competition will be judged by Speleo Technics. The purpose is to find a photograph that is suitable for use in Speleo Technics' advertising. BCRA and Speleo Technics reserve the right not to offer a prize of there is no suitable entry. Digital entries that are deemed to be of insufficient resolution, or which have been subject to an unacceptable degree of lossy compression may be disqualified. You may supply a smaller file for display during the competition but, to win the prize, you must be able to supply an acceptable quality image.
Remember that you are taking a photo that is to be used for advertising a product, so it has to show the product in a good light. The photo should be interesting and eye-catching. You should also remember that the photo might be over-printed with text, so it may benefit from dark areas in suitable places. A 'portrait' orientation is often required for magazine advertising, but posters can use 'landscape' orientation, so it is your decision - or perhaps you can take a photo that can be cropped either way? If you are submitting your entry digitally, you must be aware that magazine reproduction requires a very high resolution. If the image is to be reproduced on a full A4 page, it will need to be at least 4 megapixels in extent, and without noticeable lossy compression. It will also need to be taken with a good-quality lens.
Each cave life picture should be accompanied by a written description of its location and the environmental conditions where the specimen was found, together with the name of the species and any behaviour being exhibited. This documentation will form part of the entry. Up to three entries per person. One prize.
The Cave Life award was introduced to encourage cave photographers to look further at their environment than just at formations and other more obvious close-up subjects. To that end, the rules require that accompanying written material is submitted in order to add scientific value to the photograph. The description should record the name of the organism (common/Latin) as well as details of its behaviour, location (e.g. cave entrance or deep within a cave), conditions (e.g. wet /dry / stream / draught) and so on. This documen-tation will form part of the entry, and will be taken into account by the judges.
When judging this category the usual team of three judges will be headed by a fourth, who is a specialist in cave biology (at least to the extent that they are a caver and a biologist) and can, therefore, place a photo-graph of a mundane fungus into context alongside a photograph of a rare beetle exhibiting some behaviour. The Cave Life category is intended to go beyond photography: it will be awarded to fine photography of course, but also to a photograph which records an aspect of cave life and is documented as such.
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