We were holding a photography competition in my office. While forming the rules for the contest we realized how difficult digital photography has made it to hold such a contest. It was so much simpler in the (good?) old days of film.
First of all, ownership/copyright. In the old days, it was easy to say who the owner of a photo was. Whoever has the negative! It was as simple as that. With digital photos, anyone who has a copy of the image has as much control over it as anyone else.
Second, about digitally enhanced photos. We made a rule that digitally enhanced photos are not to be submitted. However, we knew clearly that there is no way to detect it in a fool proof way. It is now close to impossible to spot simple enhancements (color/brightness/corrections) to photos. Also, should cropping be allowed? Thinking about this from another angle, most digital cameras can do some amount of processing of the image based on the specialized photo settings used. Ideally that too should be disallowed! Also, some cameras allow you to edit the photo after it has been taken. So is it okay if the photo is edited in the camera rather than photoshopped/gimped on a computer? Where do you draw the line?
Next, we were trying to create various categories. One of the thoughts was to have categories based on camera types. This quickly ran into trouble. Now-a-days it is becoming difficult to correctly classify SLRs and point and shoots. Also, some cell phone cameras already have 12MP cameras, whereas my point-and-shoot is just 4MP. Technically, any cell phone camera (for that matter any point-and-shoot camera without a viewfinder) is an SLR! We would then have to classify cameras based on their cost! But wait, cost in India or abroad? Which year?
We just decided not to worry about any of this and have the contest in free format, just for fun.
Technically, not all camera's without separate viewfinders are SLR's! Go figure the difference between DSLR's and digicam's. But I got your point. ;-)
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