Deutsche VersionPhotography Competition: Scruffy Universities
The [State-wide student council meet of North-Rhine Westphalia][latnrw] (or however you’d translate it, the german term is the equally horrible Landes-ASten-Treffen NRW) has started a photography competition to showcase the at times appalling state of buildings of universities in the state. I think the idea is good, but the execution leaves a little to be desired.
It starts with finding information about it at all. The page of the AST (student government of sorts) of the RWTH Aachen University is [not that great][rwthasta]. They did manage to attach the press release with the same contents as the news post, but did forget to make a direct link. Sure, I know copy-and-paste, but this does not exactly scream “professional” to me.
Of course it’s mean to blame the competition for something outside it’s control, but you’d expect that the organization that started this competition would include something about it on it’s news page. [Well, no][lawnrwnews]. You will find a PDF press release in the press section, though. Since, you know, this does not concern students, only press, right?
That [the homepage] has too little content for that many pages, includes rollover effects like it’s 2001, odd titles and other web design sins, well, let’s ignore that. MySpace has taught us, again, as if 1999 wasn’t bad enough, that we can be happy already if no music starts playing when we load a page. The [terms and conditions][teilnahme], on the other hand, do cause me to wonder. Why do I have to give them the picture both digitally and in print? If they want to save money that way, then I demand that all money saved from not printing the images they want published themselves has to go directly to renovating university buildings.
Of course, you can’t expect ordinary people to understand how to use DPI as a measurement correctly, but organizers of a photography contest would have a serious advantage if they did. The 300 DPI they mention is something that any camera can reach if you just make the image small enough. 300 DPI at 20x30 cm is a clear statement and works out to 8.2 Megapixels minimum, but why didn’t they say so right from the start? Possibly because 8.2 MP is actually unreasonably large, I think you can make pictures that look perfectly nice at this size with 6 or maybe even 3, if noise is acceptable, Megapixels.
An interesting issue is copyright. They claim that the pictures become property of the jury. What does this mean? Is it just about the physical print (which would be OK with me), or is it about the copyright to the pictures, which I’d certainly not give them? A little more precision would go a long way here. Also not beyond doubt are the example images, which are duly shocking, but not very interesting as pictures themselves. This looks like they aim to get the occasional picture taken by cell phone camera, which are ([great exceptions aside of course]) usually not the ones to be printed, and never the ones that reach 8 MP.
Finally, the [links page][links] distances itself explicitly from the links to the organization behind the competition and an initiative to abandon university fees. Yeah, that looks convincing. I know, some might say better safe then sorry, but first of all it just looks hilarious, and second, this boilerplate text does not actually protect from anything, so why not cut it?
I’m not going to take pictures for this competition. I wish them luck trying to renovate the universities’ buildings, but I really can’t be bothered to deal with the competition itself.
Written on November 12th, 2008 at 08:28 pm
