Subsurface Picture of the Month contest

- Help/About

Rules and guidelines

We proudly announce the Subsurface monthly underwater photography contest featuring different subjects each month. Registration and participation is free. The winning photo is decided by registered members´ votes. The contest is open to anyone. Important note: because the voters don´t see the author´s name until the end of the voting, please don´t use any signatures or watermarks in the submitted photo.

Deadlines:
Submission: by the 15^th day of every month
Voting: by the 25^th day of every month

The winner of the actual monthly contest is the picture with the most points. We announce an annual winner after the last contest, the Photographer who collects the most points during the year wins.

Our goal is to encourage underwater photographers to share their work with each other open discussion about them. Hopefully it will help beginners to learn more about techniques as they can seek advice from experts. The Picture of the Month contest started in 2007 with the first years open exclusively to Hungarians. From 2012 we would like to invite foreign photographers so from now all the necessary information to English. Hopefully many of you will send pictures!

2012 Subjects

Month	Subject	Description	Winner
February	Scuba Diver	Images of one or more scuba divers under water.	Thomasbuvar
March	Crustaceans	Crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill or barnacles under water.	nme
April	Home sweet home	Images of underwater animals and their underwater home/habitat.	atko
May	Underwater garden	Images of habitats which look like above water gardens or plantations.	mikino
June	Predators	Images of underwater predators, carnivorous animals.	dieterkudler
July	Natural light	Images taken without any artificial lighting (strobes, torches, etc.)
August	Special month	Our Red Sea liveaboard shoot-out contest´s photos- their points won´t be summarized in the yearly contest.
September	Silhouette	Images of a subject consisting of the outline and a basically featureless interior.
October	Freshwater	Images taken in any kind of natural freshwater site (no pool photos.)
November	Spotted	Images of animals with spotted pattern.
December	Wide Angle Close Focus	Wide angle images taken at camera to subject distances of less than about 50cm.

The basic rules for every contest: (unless stated for a specific theme)
- Images should show underwater animals/objects, which were taken under water
- Split images are acceptable if the 80 percent of the photo shows the world under water
- The subject of the month must be clearly visible in the image
- The main subject can´t be dead animal
- Images showing harassment of marine environment are disqualified

As stated above, the organizers for can modify these guidelines for themes like environmental awareness, etc.

We allow any kind of image manipulation except deleting or adding objects to the original photo.

Only registered members of our website can participate in the contests. Registration is free (we use the email address only for communication, we do not send any offers or newsletters) but the competitor has to accept the rules stated above.
Each member can upload only one photo to the contest.
Winner of previous picture of the month contests are ineligible for reentry.
The submitting member, who must own full copyright, must have taken the submitted image. You can´t delete your entry from the contest; only the administrators can do it.

Submission:
- entries can be entered through each contest’s dedicated page
- maximum dimensions are 640x480 pixels. Larger entries will be automatically resized
- title and the description of the entry and be edited by the contestant
- please don´t use a watermark with the author´s name in the photo, because the voters don´t see the names of the photographers until the end of voting.

Voting:
You can vote for your favorite images during the 10 days long period in every month. Only the registered members of our websie can vote: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th places can be awarded. The 1st place vote means 5 points, the 2nd 4 points, etc.
The voting system is weighted based on the activity (submitting photos and voting) and the past results (image in the best 3, etc.) of members. This means the points of the voters will be multiplied if they send photos regularly or win a monthly contest. We decided to introduce this weighted voting system to encourage all members to be active - send photos and vote. If somebody isn’t active for a while (doesn’t enter the competition or does not vote for a while) will get the default multiplier again. Please avoid voting on your own entries. After voting, the multiplied points are summerized. The image with the most points wins.

The submitted images may be used and published only by the organizers and only to announce and promote further SubSurface Picture of the Month photo contests.

You can find the past results on the next page.

Az írás a következő lapon folytatódik!