Photography contest, coming up ...

Posted 17 May 2014 by Matt Young

... June 2. That is, we will accept entries from noon, June 2, to noon, June 16, where noon is defined by the Panda's Thumb server, which thinks it is still in Central Standard Time, or UTC(GMT) – 5 h. The rules will be essentially the same as last year's. We have not chosen categories yet, but please be assured that they will be all-inclusive. So grease your shutters and be ready! Update, May 31: The theme of the contest is History of Evolution, by which we mean photographs of fruit flies, barnacles, pea plants; fossils, stromatolites; geological formations; anything related to how we know or have deduced common descent. We will also entertain entries in a General category.

5 Comments

jnygre · 26 May 2014

I hope you'll rise the size to at least 1024 px. 600 is just ridiculous.

Matt Young · 26 May 2014

Alas, my instructions from the webmaster are 600 pixels. It has been that way for years, and no one has complained, as far as I can recall. I have only once had a picture that did not show what I wanted to with a 600-pixel limit, so I cropped it and got a much better picture as a result.

jnygre · 26 May 2014

That is has been so in the past is not a reason for not changing, as for complaints: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/07/photography-con-19.html#comment-311041 and mine, of course ;)
600 px is just a randomly chosen size which doesn't fit well with JPEG exports.

Matt Young · 26 May 2014

600 px is just a randomly chosen size which doesn’t fit well with JPEG exports.

I do not know why he chose 600, but I have asked. Meanwhile, what is the problem with 600 - should it be 2ⁿ pixels because of the discrete cosine transform? So far no one seems to have had any trouble supplying pictures with a width of 600 pixels, and my admittedly primitive program has never expressed a preference.

Matt Young · 26 May 2014

should it be 2ⁿ pixels because of the discrete cosine transform?

I asked the question too hastily. The answer is no.