One year anniversary!

Its been a whole year since ThirstyPhoto launched. In those twelve months we have evolved as each contest has brought not only great pictures, but valuable feedback from members as well. There are so many ways to grow the community farther – I wish I had more time to focus on all the cool ideas for the site!  Thanks to everyone so far for your support and participation.  I look forward to the next 12 months with you all!

Looking forward

Supporting Amateurs of all Levels

From time to time, various members have asked for new features, fixes to bugs, and generally questions about the site and the Facebook App.  One of the most common questions is how can we maintain confidence that this is an amateur-only supported site. As contests are generally open to everyone, there is no perfect way to prevent professionals from submitting photos. Its mostly based on the honor system, and diligence in checking members to ensure they don’t have an unfair advantage when competing in amateur competitions. Rest assured we’re on the look out, but my experience so far has been that this site is mostly comprised of honest amateurs looking to learn and exposure their photography to a wider audience.

There are two ways how members can win in a given contest:

1. Popular Vote : Essentially the most votes win.  I find that the 5 star rating system is used by members as a way to get the most 5 star votes. This is really dependent on the member’s, and the submitter’s ability to promote a photo to gain votes.  This is done by Sharing the photo on Facebook, email, and other sites and asking folks to vote for the photo. In the Popular Vote round, any quality of photo can win. Even a beautifully shot photo ( even from the best of professionals)  can lose to a beginner’s snap shot – if the latter is well promoted.
2. Judge’s Round: Winning photos are chosen by a few members who will judge the photos against the whole submission pool. This is typically where the photos of higher quality are chosen. But this also gives the judges a chance to critique and determine if the submission is from a professional or amateur to the best of their ability.  So it is not necessarily true that the best photo will win – if we deem it suspect.  You will typically find the higher quality photos winning this round – as is the intention – to award those who stand out.  Honorable Mentions are listed here too as the judges feel more than just the top 3 should get recognition.

Presuming it is easy to determine if someone is a professional (if is wasn’t then, they are not very good at being a professional), it is actually tougher to determine the level of amateur the rest of us members are.  There is the beginner ( with little online exposure, and little technical knowledge of photography), the experienced hobbiest ( which may even have their own site, flickr, tools, etc.), and the aspiring professional ( who is trying to charge for their photos, may have their own site, but have not broken through).  I would like to support all these type of amateur profiles – while being fair to each group. Even within these groups – the range in quality is quite broad.  I have seen some pretty basic snapshots – to some very beautifully well composed photography – all of which were from amateurs.

So maybe in the future we begin to support grouping amateurs into some basic classifications.  Having contests for each, and asking for deeper level of participation from the more experienced members. This is an idea I have been thinking a lot about lately.  I’d like your feedback on this so feel free to comment on this blog post below.

Over the next few months, I will post some blogs asking for your feedback and present a few polls to help.  So for this post, the poll will focus on what group you think you fall into.  Are there other groups worth considering?

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