Is it Cheating to Send in Photoshopped Work in at a Photography Contest


It is a modern pet peeve that the artistically inclined love to fret about. If you are a musician, you can’t stand the fact that children these days sit before their Macs to play around with GarageBand and they call themselves musicians. Why, if you are that way inclined, you could arguably have a hard time accepting that a young man with wild hair and a screaming electric guitar next to a stack of Marshall amps is a musician too. Take photography; if you have a taste for cameras and photography, then the magazine Popular Photography is probably on your monthly subscription list and you usually look forward to their Reader’s Photo Contest every year. Actually, it isn’t just the photography enthusiast that’s usually interested in that contest. Regular people out there with a camera and a computer are often able to create stunning and wild creations that you would not believe came out of the mind of a lone everyday person with no equipment, training or funds. I remember an entry in that photography contest about 15 years ago that just blew everyone away. It was a large unsupported phantom faucet mysteriously floating in the air against a beautiful blue sky, that was pouring torrents of crystal water. People couldn’t stop wondering at the marvels of digital photo manipulation.

That was before Photoshop became popular. Now, it looks like almost all the pictures in that photography contest, like any other, have had a little of Photoshopping done (if not a lot), and everyone is up in arms at how the ancient and august art form that photography is, is being subverted, by any punk with a computer. To see a perfect touched-up woman in a wedding dress walking up the aisle, the folds of her gown just picture-perfect, her smile maybe a little too radiant, the lighting catching behind her veil to form a kind of halo and little flowers tumbling down her train in just a precious way – all of this is wonderful to see on a photograph only because setting things up this way, and having the skill to time your picture perfectly, with the right lighting, all in an instant, requires artistry and training of the most extreme nature. But if you could just take your average photograph, move in the lighting on Maya, redraw the smile to be more angelic and radiant on Photoshop, change the angle of the shot and the whole background and put in extra sheen on another program, it doesn’t really say much for your ability with a camera.

The only reason a picture like this is remarkable enough that it would win a photography contest is that people imagine that it requires photographic skill. The picture itself is nothing that great. The skill to capture it all in one frame, is what wins the admiration. So is it fair to cry foul here? Not so fast, the Photoshoppers say. If you run your own photography contest how would you put this down in the rules, what is to be considered photography, and what is not? For instance, long before anyone ever had a computer, any photo shot would require that you used a bunch of lights and reflectors to get your picture to shine and stand out. And then your darkroom techniques would make that even better. You choose a camera that could focus on the foreground and blur out the background in a way that really never happens in reality. Or you spent hours getting your subjects, “your actors” set up just so. That was the low-tech way, and today we have a high-tech way. What makes it unfair now?

It’s not just a photography contest that you would have trouble defining specific rules in. Defining where a line lies, is always difficult. Perhaps the best way to go about it would be to just move all the high-tech stuff to its own contest.

Effective Search Engine Optimization Techniques


What does a good search engine optimization campaign look like? What elements of this type of marketing are crucial to get right if you want to make sure that your website will be positioned very high within the search engines like Google and Bing? I’m sure that you have heard a lot about on-site SEO, so I will not take too much time to talk about here, but I will say that you should never ignore it.

A good search engine optimization campaign will always begin with making sure that the on site elements have been built properly. Make sure that you have all of the relevant pages and that you have several pages of good content ready to go before you start your broader optimization campaign. People who start forging ahead with a large link building campaign without making sure that their website is ready for it tend to not do so well because they’re not in the right state of mind.

Their approach is not systematic in in order to have the desired effect. Ranking a website is a scientific process. Rankings are based on strict algorithms and nothing more. If you understand this then you should understand why you must be systematic and how you approach this entire idea.

So please just make sure that you have taken the time to build out your website properly. Additionally go back and double check that the keywords you have chosen to target are actually ones that you can compete for. Choosing keywords that are loaded with competition is a terrible idea because it will take you far too long to ever cracked the top 10 in the rankings and he will likely never make one thin dime off of that site. You will live and die based upon your keyword choices.

Now if we assume that you have all of the basic parts of the site building process done properly. That you have made sure that you have good keywords and have done all of the requisite on site SEO then it is time to move on to a broader campaign.

What that means is we have to start holding links that point back to our website. However this may want to do in a very natural way. We want the link building to look like it is happening not because we are making it happen, but because consumers are making it happen. The more naturally to her strategy is, the better your site will do. To make this happen we are going to start doing things like writing relevant articles and with in that relevant article we are going to have a link that points back to her site.

However as we build these links we want to make sure that they have a good deal of diversity and are not just spamming the exact same anchor text over and over again. It would look terribly unnatural if you build 1000 links in each one pointing back to your website with the exact same anchor text.

Putting Interactive Website Design to Work for your Business


When you put an interactive website design together, your job as designer is to create an experience that simply works as a whole. It’s the only thing that keeps visitors coming back. How do you create an interactive website in such a way that people will keep coming back? Well, you want to put everything you have into building a website that is truly engaging.

When you go with a website design concept that’s very new, innovative and creative, it can be a bit of a wager whether you really manage to engage the viewer. With a design philosophy that’s very new, some people are likely to feel turned off. When you go with a conventional layout, you can be pretty sure that you know what your audiences will think. You can plan more effectively when you know that.

While there are certain design features that certainly can be tinkered with, do make sure that your general layout isn’t unconventional. More than anything, people really want to be able to just move about a website with ease. They want convenience first. Take for instance what happened when Apple, in a recent OS X version, chose to completely change how the scrollbar acted. Lots of people were horrified when the scrollbar did the exact opposite of what they were used to. You don’t want that kind of reaction. Especially, if you aren’t Apple.

It can be very important interactive website design step to integrate your website very deeply with the social media. People just want to share everything all the time, and to see input on everything they do from their social media friends all the time. The more you are able to integrate the two experiences into one interface, the more convenient and well-loved your website will become. If you’re designing a website for small business, bringing the social media in can be particularly beneficial. People will feel better about leaving word around about your business.

It can take a while for some webpages to load. That’s especially true if you use many images. People do have faster Internet connections now, and using images and other data heavy items in your interactive website design is no longer such a bad idea. In fact, wherever possible, you should use color and imagery to make the experience a lot a lot more interesting than it might otherwise be.

When a page does take a little while to load, you could take the time to entertain your visitor with things like factoids to do with your business or industry in general.