[AGA-Contest] [104] usual beefs -- need to write up

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

I need to make one page on the site just to list the top ten 
beefs I have with some of the entries.  Here are the two I am correcting 
today:

1. lack of cropping.  People take a photo of 8-foot long, 12" high tank, 
and it gets uploaded as a 4:3 photo.  Ends up looking like watching a 
letterboxed movie from hell.  And to make things worse, in the new "mega 
monitor" mode I added last year, the main photo is resized based on the 
number of pixels in it, not its width...so those black bars count.  So I 
have probably gone in and re-cropped about 25-40 photos in the past day.

1a. adding frames photos.  Leaving photos uncropped is one thing.  But 
there are people who decide there needs to be a big black frame around 
their photo.  Why?  I don't know.  But their photos only end up looking 
smaller in the show.  And I have to go in and re-crop them all anyway.

2. planting plans with the text in the photos.  This one drives me 
absolutely bonkers.  The entrant HAD to have typed in all that stuff in 
photoshop.  And half of the texts are unreadable at 400 width, the others 
look ridiculously huge at higher resolution.  Worse, there's a place to do 
it all -- in the caption for the photo, or the plant description.  One 
would think that the way all the previous years' entries look once edited, 
folks might get the hint.  But I have probably re-typed 10-20 planting 
plan contents -- and cropped the names off the plan itself.

2a. planting plans that aren't really planting plans at all.  A lot of 
people have now interpreted "planting plan" to mean "legend".  It's not. 
It's supposed to show how you planted the tank.  But instead now we're 
getting desaturated copies of the main photo with numbers added.  That's 
OK, but I can't help but thinking it'd be nice if we had more simple 
drawings showing what the planter intended.


Our little prop worked, and the photo shoot last night was a success.  Now 
I have 5 hours of photoshopping to do.  Ah well. :)

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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