BIG BLUE HOLIDAY SEASON PHOTO CHALLENGE
Yep, it's that time of the year again folks, the holidays are fast approaching. With that in mind, we are going to have a photo contest that will be all about this time of the year. We have in the US our Thanksgiving. All over the world, we have Christmas and New Years and for many parts of the world, we have a lot of snow. That’s what this will be all about; we want to celebrate the feeling and spirit of not only the holidays, but the season as well.

Here are the rules, just to keep everyone on the same track:

1. The theme of this contest is the holiday season on the railroad.
   
2. You can take any railroad picture, or a picture around a railroad, any scale up to 1:1.
   
3. These pictures can have a holiday theme, or just be a winter scene. For those where there is no snow (like in my part of Arizona or in OZ), just depict what looks right for your area during this time of the year.
   
4. Each entrant can post up to five pictures. These pictures can be of different views of the same subject or up to five different subjects.
   
5. On November 1, we will open a thread specifically for posting your entries. You can post in there once, if you want to add or change anything, you can edit that post. You can put up to five of your entry photos in that one post.
   
6. Each entry will be judged on their overall pictures, not just one, unless, of course, they only enter one.
   
7. You will be allowed to add special affects such as borders, tinting, fish eye, overlays, inserts, stitching more than one photo together or whatever your photo editing ability or imagination might inspire.
   
8. We will have a voting poll at the end of the contest; certificates will be awarded for the top three winners.
   
9. The person entering it must have taken all pictures.
   
10. The if you’re submitting pictures from a layout, it doesn’t have to be yours, just as long as you are the one taking the picture.

The contest will start on November 1, and run until Christmas. We will open a voting poll thread sometime on December 26, dependent on how cranky or achy I feel when I wake up.

Please use this thread for any questions or comments. Please, do not post your entries here in this thread.

Nice,,,sounds good to me.

Should they be new photos or can we re-use ones posted here already?

BR60103 Wrote:Should they be new photos or can we re-use ones posted here already?

You know, good question. We've alway shied away from allowing photos that have already been posted in the forums to be used in any photo contest. To be sure, I know that our old forum didn't allow you to post an existing pic in another post, you would get an "picture already exists" error message when you tried to upload it. So I'm saying, let's stick to the old rules and use a picture that you haven't already uploaded to another post. Use an old picture if you want, that's OK, just as long as it's new to us here.

The start date for this challenge is drawing near. Get your photos ready, get your camera batteries charged up. Do what needs to be done, but we want to see those photos. I'll open a photo submission thread on Nov. 1, everyone can post their pics in there.

Just a reminder that this challenge has been open now for four weeks and it's getting to look a lot like Christmas out there, so let's look around for those holiday or winter shots and start posting them. The thread to do that in is right here: http://www.the-gauge.net/forum/viewtopic...=37&t=3567

OK, it's a week past Christmas and I just re-read the rules. I find that I'm a bit late in putting the voting poll together, but I don't think there's reason to panic, I'll get to it before the end of this weekend, but for now, we'll call this challenge as closed.