Christmas cover
As a member of Photocrowd who perpetually gets frustrated by members who are ‘unable’ to follow briefs or insist on voting for images that are off brief, I wish you could be stricter in the writing and implementation of your brief for the Christmas Cover competition. It is obvious that the image you are looking for needs to be in portrait format so why do you allow images in landscape format?
Of course you can crop any good landscape ones to fit, so why don’t you insist on portrait format so that the members have to do their own cropping of landscape images? The outcome is that the ‘crowd’ part of the competition has voted for loads of landscape images (that clearly cannot be cropped successfully) merely because they like the image, not because it would make a good cover – not fair, in my opinion. In your helpful hints, all you need to say is that all entries must be cropped to portrait format and count any landscape ones that creep in as being ‘off brief’, however good it is. Or make the judging ‘expert only’ so that the poor voting of the ‘crowd’ does not skew the overall results for the Photocrowd ranking system. Irina Wright Running this cover competition for our Christmas issue, which is our biggest seller of the year, is quite a risky thing for us to do, as we’re placing a lot of trust in our readers and Photocrowd members to come up with a winning photo. The wrong choice can have a negative impact on sales, which is why for every other issue of the year we spend a lot of time choosing and fine-tuning the cover picture and headlines. It amazes me that so many people seem not to have noticed that magazine covers are invariably portrait format, and submit uncroppable landscape-format images. But if we only allowed portrait-format ones to be entered, then we would be excluding many submissions that could potentially make a great cover when cropped. I usually spend several weeks worrying about what we’ll get as it is, though so far our readers have always come good. This year is no exception. We’ll take a look at tightening the rules for next year though, and make our requirements clearer as well – Nigel Atherton, Editor