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A Conscientious Photography Contest

   26 August 2009, late evening

Jörg Colberg runs the website Conscientious, a fine-art photography blog. His site is regularly referenced online when people discuss photography. How he managed to position himself as a goto authority on fine-art photography, i’m not completely sure. As far as I can tell, he’s just some dude that likes photographs.

Colberg is running a photography competition. He plans to showcase the work of the winner on his site. It’s not a pay-to-play contest, and there isn’t any money to be one. It’s all about getting exposure. I think this is a great way to showcase new talent. This seems to be one of Colberg’s goals, since he states, “[the Conscientious Portfolio Competition] is aimed at emerging photographers.”

If you don’t have a website you will not be able to enter the competition; this might strike you as unfair, but I think every serious photographer should have her/his own website, because it shows that s/he is serious about what s/he does (plus, my blog is about linking to websites – and what can I link to if there’s no website?).

I can’t say I know too many fine-art photographers, but one would assume that being able to take pictures and being able to write HTML are two independent skills. More so, if there was a group of photographers who were most likely not to have a portfolio site of their own, I suspect that group would be photographers who need to get exposure by entering online photography competitions. Colberg actually calls out Flickr in particular as being unsuitable for this competition. Certainly there is a lot of crap on Flickr. And then there is a lot of amazing photography. The derision sometimes expressed about the site seem more than a little lame, like my earlier complaints about LiveJournal.

No doubt the contest will produce some good results, but I think by limiting where he sources contributions, it will also be far less interesting than it could have been.

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