IanF said:
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 :t:
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.