Digital Home Thoughts: Beware Of Photographic Flattery: My Picture.com Story

We all enjoy approval and encouragement, even if it comes from strangers. Sometimes especially if it comes from strangers, because it can seem more genuine (hey, your mom is supposed to love you no matter what). This is a cautionary tale for photographers. About seven years ago (yeah, this story goes back a ways) I saw a banner ad for a photo contest, and I thought "What the heck, I'll enter one of my photos and see what happens." It was a Picture.com contest, which they seem to be still running at the time of this writing.

When I submitted my photos, I thought it was a pretty good image - it was a picture of my young cousin smiling, and it's hard to take a bad photo of a child smiling. At the time I took this photo I had a Canon Powershot S100 (no digital SLR yet), and I was just starting to get interested in photography. I didn't think my image was "award winning" by any stretch, but sometimes all it takes to be the winner is for no one else to show up, so I thought I'd give it a try. Below is the image I submitted for the "contest".


Figure 1: Aww, ain't she cute?

A week or two after submitted the photo, I received an email message from the contest organizers. If memory serves, it was from the prestigious-sounding "International Library of Photography". They said my photo had been accepted into a forthcoming hardcover photography book that would be published within a few months. I was elated! I thought that getting one of my photos published in a book was quite an accomplishment, so when they sent me a link to an online form to order the book, I ordered two - and passed the link on to my uncle and aunt so they could order a copy of the book as well. They might have passed it along to others. After shipping and customs fees to get the books to Canada I think they ended up costing nearly $80 each (the book itself was around $50). I didn't care about the cost - my photo was in a book! When it arrived, it was a nicely-bound hardcover book that looked like a work of quality...until I opened it up and looked at the photos inside.


Figure 2: The book of "award-winning" photos that my photo was included in.

The book was quite thick, and on every page there were six small photos - and once I started seeing the quality of the photos, page after page, the sudden realization of what this book was came to me: every single person who submitted a photo for the contest was "winner". Every "winner" was told that their photo would appear in this hard-cover photo book, and every winner was given the opportunity to purchase a book for $50. Now if you had entered your photo in a contest, and told it was a "winning entry" and would be published in a hard-cover book, wouldn't you buy at least one copy? Sure you would - you'd want to have a record of your winning photos and and 30 seconds of fame knowing that you were in a book. I bet at least 80% of the "winners" purchased one or more copies of the book. There were 207 pages of photos in the book, six photos per page, so roughly 1200 photos. Let's say of those 1200 photos, the photographer bought an average of one book - some would certainly buy more, some might not buy at all. Some quick math tells us that this book might sell $60,000 worth, easy. If Picture.com does this six times a year...well that's quite a tidy sum garnered from the "winners" of their photography "contest". Here's an example of what kinds of photos were included in the book:



The bottom two photos might be considered "nice" photos, and perhaps even award-winning if the playing field was small enough, but the top two? The top two images are simply bad photos in every sense of the word. They might represent wonderful memories for the photographers that took them, but there's really nothing compelling about them from a photographic point of view. I flipped through the book, feeling a sense of disbelief: photo after photo, most of the images were like these top two. Sure, every so often I'd come across an image that was decent, but over 90% of the photos in the book were poorly framed, grainy, low-resolution, and certainly wouldn't win in a real photo contest, even if it were the only only entry.

Picture.com suckered me in with their "contest", and it looks liked they're still at it - look at this gigantic list of "winners"; there must be thousands of names there. While some of the images I looked at were quite good, others were...less so. There's nothing illegal about what Picture.com is doing, but I don't consider if ethical in any way - hopefully by publishing this article you'll know to be wary of this company and their "contests".

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He still feels a bit sheepish he was scammed like this.