Hi Everyone

A friend of mine has entered a photography contest with various rounds. Everyone's votes for each round is added up with the winner winning a new Nikon D5300 and a runner up prize of a Nikon J3.

The contest started fairly in the first round with the best photographs getting the most votes, but midway through the second round someone decided to make it a popularity contest instead of about skill/talent:
I don't know about you but I hate it when a contest turns into this.

What I ask you to do is this.(the site is in Swedish so please use google translate if you need to)

1. Please register here http://www.familjeliv.se/Medlemmar/registrera.php
2. Once your account is activated please go here http://www.familjeliv.se/Forum-20-178/m71838920.html and vote for your favourite Macro image.
3. Then go here http://www.familjeliv.se/Forum-20-178/m71870620.html and vote for your favourite Nature image.

All I want is to make the contest fair and weed out the cheat which is why I don't tell you the images my friend has. I can trust in everyone here to actually vote for the BEST image.

Please let's make it about the talent.

Thank you for your time

Regards

Tony

Don't they ALL turn into that, Tony? And isn't that the point of them? The organisers want the people with most friends to attract attention to their business - at least, that's they usual way it goes. It's about SEO (or sometimes about acquiring copyright) not about photographic skill.

That maybe so but I think this contest is small enough that we can make a difference.

To be honest I'm struggling to spot any 'talent' at all in most of those images.

I agree. Should be about good images not popularity. And why did they let that naked dude with a woody in the contest!? That is almost gay porn.  Some of the other images are nice but the contrast between average and very good is big. Some look dull and simple and some are very good! So I understand if some of those images would win agains the better images that might be very frustrating.

Frustrating indeed seeing as number 12 is winning the nature category and number 22 in the macro category. Both these images are from the same person and it now appears She/He may be opening 'phantom' accounts and voting for herself. This is not a path I want to go down and would never consider it. But it seems i'm not getting the support here that I need to stop this cheat.

I guess thought people here would be as outraged by the whole thing as I am? Guess I was wrong!

I'll tell you what does outrage me, it is when companies run "transfer the copyright" competitions and then people steal my images and enter them as their own. It happened to me three times that I know of in just one Qatar Airways "contest", with different culprits involved each time. I had to send proof of ownership to QA to get them to take them down, which they did for the first two, I don't know if they did the third time since they didn't bother replying to me.

Interestingly, their "competition" was run by a foreign company that specialises in them, and the images were made to re-sort every time you opened a thumbnail to check it, making it virtually impossible to track down thieves in a huge pile of pix (every time you checked a file you had to start searching again from page 1). I rather suspect that hiding theft was the purpose of the re-sort.

Hej Tony! You are a good friend, trying to influence a small competition on a local swedish site. But this is just one of hundreds, prob thousands... So don't take it against us for not fighting it with you. It's too much work to register to a site to then click on an image in a contest that is not relevant to me. Sorry!

I'll tell you what does outrage me, it is when companies run "transfer the copyright" competitions and then people steal my images and enter them as their own. It happened to me three times that I know of in just one Qatar Airways "contest", with different culprits involved each time. I had to send proof of ownership to QA to get them to take them down, which they did for the first two, I don't know if they did the third time since they didn't bother replying to me.

Interestingly, their "competition" was run by a foreign company that specialises in them, and the images were made to re-sort every time you opened a thumbnail to check it, making it virtually impossible to track down thieves in a huge pile of pix (every time you checked a file you had to start searching again from page 1). I rather suspect that hiding theft was the purpose of the re-sort.

In all the international photo competitions I've entered, this was a key topic I vetted in the terms and conditions of the competition.  More than once some new competition director would slip that in, it would get huge exposure on my other forum, Wetpixel, and the organization would either suffer quality submissions or change the terms.  For competitions like the one being discussed here, most people who don't know better will upload their stuff and not read the terms or know what they mean.  I stay away from these all together.  The legit competitions are when you submit your work to a panel of industry experts who go into a room over a weekend, close the doors, and come out with a list of the winners.  Even the competition directors who are not judges are not allowed in the room during judging. This is the way real competitions should be run.