[glendak2]

What a delightful contest! My problem was choosing between fantastic macro insects and gorgeous artistic butterflies. I would love to see this theme repeated sometime, but divided. Anyway, thanks to all the excellent photographers who shared some of their passion with us. And thanks to BF for giving them a platform.

[IanF]

Congratulations to Jebir, the winner of this months competition with 11/159 votes for 'Come here... - just a little bit closer... '

A fine photograph technically very difficult to capture.

Congratulations to everyone else who entered. The spead of votes shows just how difficult it was to choose between the entries.

[Marmot]

Congratulations Jebir.

I think this has been one of the hardest to vote on so far. I had a shortlist of 10 !

[jebir]

So, now the voting is over and... I WON!!!

Thanks for all the votes. It was a tie run and all entries were certainly very good! I enjoyed looking at each one of them and I was very thrilled by the close competition.

Thanks goes also to the administrators and moderators of this fabulous forum for arranging these contests and even managing to get such a nice sponsored prize from Zeiss this time ;-))

Cheers, Jens.

[Katy Penland]

Originally Posted by IanF

We ran this as a theme since in my experience birdwatchers and photogrpahers share an interest in Insects as demonstrated in the Forums and in the Gallery. I had expected more butterfly entries since they are usually easier to approach and quite photogenic.

The number of votes cast is a little disappointing considering the number of members on the site each day but I guess photgraphy and this subject is not everyones cup of tea.

I was very happy to see this category as a contest theme because as little insect photography as I've done, until I saw some of the shots here, I didn't really appreciate how hard it was to get not only sharp but nicely composed photos of hard-to-see subjects that, in most cases, are on the move more than some birds are. And while I'm not fond of spiders at *all* (sorry, all you arachnid afficianados), I sure love watching any other kind of creepy-crawly when I run across them in the field. And I never pass up butterfly and moth photos -- they're just wonderful, especially those taken in other locales where I have no hope of ever seeing one live.

The voting booth banner was a little late in going up this month due to Admin being away at the Rutland Bird Fair last weekend when the competition closed.

We are still open to ideas and suggestions as to how things can be improved

Ian, a couple things occurred to me as I let the slideshow run at the default 2-second interval:

It would be really nice to not have to use the scrollbar to get past the site's "masthead" at the top of each screen to view the photos. If there's a way to program the "slideshow" so that only the photo comes up without having to manually bring it into view, perhaps it would encourage more members to view and vote. With 92 entries, even set at the 2-second interval, there's barely enough time to scroll to bring the picture into view before the next photo starts downloading (which freezes the scroll function), giving short shrift to each photo viewed. Just as an experiment, I re-set the interval to 4 seconds, which helped, but it also of course doubled the amount of time needed to view all the entries -- *and* you're still stuck with having to use the scrollbar to get past the masthead to view the images.

Also, if each photo was the same size, that would've helped since once some of them were so large, you had to scroll to see the entire photo -- not possible on a 2-second interval. At least it wasn't for me. Most photo competitions (print, don't know about internet-based comps) have a maximum size allowed. Wonder if that wouldn't be helpful here so that the entire photo fits within the screen without having to scroll. Or would this require too much work for photographers to re-size and re-upload their photos?

FYI, I'm on a DSL connection so dowload speeds aren't an issue. Just wondered about the field of view maybe being more viewer-friendly.

[IanF]

Hi Katy,

I'm glad you liked the theme.

Unfortunately we are using the Gallery software for something it wasn't designed.

The banners are fixed in place and obviously help pay the monthly bills. At present there is no way to change the way the competiton photos are presented whether individually or in slide show as any changes would affect the whole Gallery.

It is something that has been under consideration for quite a while and there may be changes sometime soon.

As regards photo size then there is a preset limit of 800x800, but most are a maximum of 800x600. We used to have a rule for the competitions of a smaller size but it was disappointing that so many members didn't read the rules fully and had their entries disqualified so the size rule was removed and left to the default Gallery limit.

An alternative would be to host the competition in the forums which are a different software package and give better full sized viewing as they used to be in the distant past but they couldn't then be transferred to the Gallery on the competition closing.

[mymantra]

Congratulations Jebir on an awesome shot! I was surprised and honored to score third place. (At least it was the highest placed butterfly:)) I had to "pull one out of the bag" for my entry. As you may have noticed, mine was taken last October. This was owing to a real dearth of butterflies in my area. The places I went last year and easily saw hundreds of butterflies of many different species, now I go and see two or three butterflies in total! I suspect the West Nile disease scare has prompted a dramatic increase in the spraying of insecticides which has greatly reduced the number of insects in general. Oh, well maybe next year!

[Katy Penland]

Thanks for that, Ian. I should've known, being relatively new here, there were good, historical reasons for the way things were done, particularly from a technical or administrative standpoint. (Hope I didn't give Ollie a heart attack with my questions about programming! )