So like me, how often do you enter competitions and think I'll never win. I'm one of those but at the same time I do go on the theory of well if you don't enter you'll never know. If like some it's a matter of filling out a form then we really shouldn't not make the time.
When it comes to photography competitions this is another matter. Firstly you have to understand the criteria that you have to meet (just like any competition).
Then you have to think about whether you're able to capture that, then you need to go and do it.
Or like in my case recently I saw the competition then trawled through Lightroom to find images that I think might stand a chance.
There's your next hurdle, your inner critic. If you keep learning and practicing you'll look through and find some you might want to enter and then start critiquing them again even though when you first saw them you really liked them. But now you're seeing things that you hadn't noticed before. So it's always best to have someone around that you can send and ask for their opinion.
If this is all good then it's a matter of loading it onto the competition website (or whatever their way of receiving the image is) and then waiting and seeing what the outcome is.
In my case it was a case of totally forgetting about it and then when I got notified to say that I was a runner up in the hourly competition I genuinely thought that it was a spam message. So I kindly responded (stupidly if I thought it was spam), asking which image it was I had submitted as my memory was letting me down, and low and behold they sent me through an image of mine. I'd also gone to look at the website and the memory was jogged. Now I had to keep it a secret for a couple of weeks until it was officially announced at a ceremony in New York. Sadly I didn't get invited, unless that email had gone into my junk items. Sadly again, it hadn't after checking. Still I was dumbfounded that I'd managed to even get a runners up spot in a competition that had over 100,000 entrants.
So if you ever see a competition and want to enter but don't think you have a chance, what do you have to lose.
