Contests

Congratulations to Justin Trapp for winning the Sports Themed October Fstoppers Forum Contest! Each month we host a photo contest over at FstoppersForum.com where the winner gets their photography on the top banner of Fstoppers.com as well as a nice piece of lighting equipment from the good folks at Photoflex. This month Photoflex is giving away an OctoDome: Extra Small Basic Kit. If you win you will also get to pick the theme for the next month's contest as well as choose the winner. This month Justin will be our guest judge. So if you think you have what it takes to compete, head over to the Contest and post your best EMOTION themed photo.

Are you a photographer who felt like you were unable to participate in our BTS summer contest because you didn't own a DSLR that shot video? Well our good friend Michael over at www.Michaelthemaven.com is hosting a few contests and one of the prizes is a Canon T2i digital camera. What do you have to do to win you ask? Just submit your best cell phone photo! Lee and I are "Celebrity" judges for the contest and right now only 20 submissions have been made. You can read more about the contest here and you have until Friday to submit. Too bad we are judges or I might have tried to enter myself :)

The September contest just wrapped up and I am happy to say that Shaadi Faris won. It will be shocking to many of you that Shaadi is not a professional photographer and does not have a website but he still won this contest with over 150 submissions. As promised, Shaadi now has a banner on the top of FS and he won a small LiteDome kit from Photoflex. Shaadi chose to make the theme for the October contest "sport" and he will be choosing the winner at the end of the month. Photoflex decided to raise the bar and give a Octodome NXT Kit to the winner this month! Head on over to the forum here to submit your image for this months contest. I'm am actually really envious that I can't compete in this contest; I want that bank!

This is just a friendly reminder that the winner for our monthly contest will be chosen in 2 days. If you haven't entered yet, you can submit your pictures with the theme of "motion" here. This months winner will get to have their website/image on our banner on the top of Fstoppers.com and Photoflex will be giving the winner a LiteDome Kit for your on camera flash.

I am happy to say that our contest is finally over and Paddy Fernandez has won by a landslide (93 votes, Sans was second with 51). As promised, Paddy will get to choose between a Nikon D300s or a Canon 7D. With this camera we hope that Paddy will continue to create BTSVs for us and now they will be in beautiful HD. I know that the voting for this contest has not gone as smoothly as we all would have wanted but we can say that there was no cheating involved and we jumped the gun when we paused the contest. In the future we will probably have some sort of celebrity judge panel for our big contests to keep issues like this from happening. Please congratulate Paddy and give us ideas for the next contest in the comment box below. Also, don't forget about our monthly photography contest.

BTS - Football Composite from Paddy Fernandez on Vimeo.

As most of you know, Lee and I decided to close the voting of the BTS Video Contest because of some fishy voting patterns we saw the day before voting was to end. Collectively, we decided that the best thing to do was to pause the voting until we could investigate the suspicious votes. Unfortunately both Lee and I were out of the country and could not look into the issue until last week. What we found was no one was actually cheating. After talking to the creators of the top 4 most popular videos, we all came to a fair compromise: we would open the contest voting for an additional 4 days and change the poll so voting remained hidden. You can watch the top 10 videos and cast your vote HERE if you have not already done so. All previous votes are still valid and part of this contest. The whole idea behind this contest was to have the Fstoppers readers vote on what video they though was the most instructional and innovative. We clearly said that if we found users creating multiple accounts then their video would be disqualified. What we found was some of our readers are just better and campaigning for votes than others and having your friends vote for you was never against the rules. So again, we think the most fair solution is to allow a few more days for voting. To be eligible to vote, you still have to have 3 posts after being registered for 24 hours. I personally hate that this voting experience wasn't as smooth as we had planned, and we definitely want to get a camera in the hands of the winner. Good luck to everyone and feel free to use facebook, twitter, and even the good ol telephone if you want to drive votes to your video. Thanks again to everyone who participated in our first ever contest and be sure to check out the monthly contests over at www.fstoppersforum.com

I am proud to announce our first monthly contest winner is Ken Brown. The theme for the photography contest was "technology" and Ken delivered a gorgeous shot of a Lotus sports car. As promised, Ken now has his own banner on the top of our website and he gets to choose the winner of the September contest. The next theme is "motion". Please submit your pictures by posting them here.

Ok guys, here is the deal. We did some poking around and I am happy to say that it doesn't appear that anyone has been cheating. Multiple contestants got many of their friends and family members to sign up and vote for them and although that wasn't our ideal plan, it is totally fair and within our rules. So, we were about to start the voting again but one of our top contestants asked us to postpone it a little longer because he is leaving the country this week. I am trying to be as fair as I can to everyone here. Perhaps it was a bad idea to pause the voting but we are doing the best we can. We knew that if there was cheating and we let the contest end it would have been much worse.

Just a friendly reminder that you have 3 days left to enter our monthly photography contest. Submit your "technology" pictures by posting them here. We just got back into the states yesterday and we should have the BTS contest for the camera figured out and running again on Tuesday.

There has been some shady activity on our forum. Patrick and I are about to head out of the country for 5 days and we will not have internet. We have decided to pause the contest voting so that we can research IPs of the voters on the contest. More info soon.

Paddy, Keith, Sans, and Sean. Please send us an email at contactfstoppers@gmail.com. I would like to start a discussion with all of you.

Our big contest is about to end but we thought it would be fun to start up a monthly contest. Obviously we can't afford to give away a new camera every month but we can offer up our coveted banner space at the top of our site. So far we have only given out banners to big name contributors of our site. We have had other photographers offer to pay us for the clickable space and we turned them down. We have decided to do a monthly photography contest and the winner will get their picture and link to their website in flash banner at the top of our site for the next full month. This month the theme of your pictures must be "technology". At the end of August I will chose my favorite image and the photographer will win the banner placement for the next month. The winner will also get to choose next months theme and choose the winner. Please post your "technology" pictures here. Is this a good idea? Will you participate? Let me know in the comments below.

First of all I would like to apologize for the delay. We have been in contact with a few other web admins with contest experience and they warned us that cheating could be a big problem. We wanted to create a fair voting system before we jumped into this and we have finally figured it out. To keep the voting fair (and not a popularity contest) the poll will take place on our forums here. To vote you must be a member of the forum and you must have made at least 3 comments on other posts before you are eligible to vote. Commenting 3 times is not hard but it is difficult enough to deter random friends who are not Fstoppers readers from voting and it keeps users from creating multiple accounts. If you are in the running, feel free to tell your friends to sign up and vote for you, but if you make multiple forum accounts you will be disqualified (we CAN see who you are). We were planning on picking our favorite 5 videos for you guys to vote on but we had so many good submissions that we have narrowed it down to 10 videos to vote on. If you didn't make the top 10 please don't be discouraged. Keep making videos and sending them in. After you pick your favorite video in the full post, head over to the forum to vote. Voting will last 5 days starting now.

Lee and I decided months ago that it would be exciting to have a contest on Fstoppers to see what our readers can do behind a camera. Over the course of 3 months we received over 80 submissions from YOU, our readers! There is no possible way that we can share all 80+ of these videos on the front of Fstoppers but we believe that everyones work deserves the chance to be seen. We have decided upload every submission in 4 threads so that everyone has the opportunity to easily view these videos. In the next few days Lee and I will choose our favorite videos. These videos will be voted on by the community, and the winner will win a Canon 7D or Nikon D300s. A lot of time has been given for these videos so we hope you guys enjoy watching them as much as we did. Thanks again to everyone for getting up, going out, and creating something interesting!

Volume 2 of the video submissions

Volume 3 of the video submissions

Volume 4 of the video submissions

I know everyone who entered the contest is patiently waiting for the voting to begin and I wanted to give you all a quick update. We are going to take this week to continue to post our favorite contest entries on the front page. Then we plan to create a post that has every video submission in one post so that our readers can easily find and watch all of them. We were then going to pick our favorite 5 videos and allow the community to vote on them. We got a lot of great submissions though so we may choose more than 5 favorites. To combat cheaters, the voting will be taking place on the forums and each member will get 1 vote only. We don't want this contest to be a popularity contest where whoever has the most friends wins. By having the poll on the forum we will be able to track votes and make sure that everything is fair.

The final day to film and upload your submission to the Fstoppers BTS Contest 2010 is here! Over the last 90 days we have received over 60 submissions and have seen some really fun and creative photoshoots. It has also been exciting to see the talent from the Fstoppers community and to be able to see our readers in action. Lee and I will continue to feature some of our favorite videos in the upcoming weeks as the final process of declaring a winner gets closer. Since many of our readers are from across the globe, we think it is only fair that everyone has a chance to submit their video up until the last minute. So please make sure that your video is uploaded to Vimeo.com or Youtube.com by the end of August 1st, and being the kind people that we are, we will give everyone a grace period of one day to have it posted to the Fstoppers Forum. Everyone at Fstoppers encourages you to continue creating BTS videos for all of your projects even after this contest is over. Thanks again to everyone who has taken part in this contest. We hope you have not only been able to grow as a photographer but also as a video editor as well. If you are interested in seeing what everyone has done for the contest, you can view all the videos HERE.

In case you haven't heard, Fstoppers is currently giving away a 7D or D300s to the creator of the best BTS video. You can get more info on our contest at www.fstoppers.com/contest. This post is just a friendly reminder that you now have 30 days left to submit your video. So far we have had about 5 submissions, and nothing yet has been mind blowing. At this point anyone could easily win this thing.

Thank you everyone for waiting patiently. Our contest is finally underway. Check out the video below and view the full post for more information about how to win a Canon 7D or Nikon D300s.

Fstoppers.com Contest: Win A New Canon 7D Or Nikon D300s For Best BTS Video from FStoppers on Vimeo.

I am happy to say that today we reached 1000 followers on Twitter and that means we can finally begin our contest. Please give us a few more days to film the video explaining all of the details of the contest. We cannot give out too much information yet but I will say that it has something to do with the best behind the scenes video. The exciting thing about this contest is that we may not have many entries because we aren't very big yet. This means that if you do decide to submit, you have a very good chance of winning. Get your creative juices flowing, this contest will be underway soon.

We will be giving a way a Canon 7D or D300s (whichever the winner wants) in a contest in the near future. What are we waiting for? We want at least 1000 twitter followers (we are at about 750 right now) before we start our contest. So if you have twitter you can help us hurry this along at www.twitter.com/fstoppers.