There was a photography competition held by a group at my work place. I submitted one of the photos I took. I knew that its not good enough to win, but I just wanted to try. Finally, the results are released and as I expected, I didn’t see the photo I submitted. All my anxiety was to look at the winning photos. If you know your competition, there are good chances of winning atleast the next time. So, I wanted to analyze my competition first.

As soon as I saw the first photo, I can feel that I was too stupid to submit. The photo is damn good. Second and third photos were excellent. I became happy rather than being disappointed. I lost to great photos. I would have been very disappointed if the winning photos were not that good.

But, my happiness ended when I started to look for specs of those photos as I wanted to know how the best photos were taken (I wanted shutter speeds, focal lengths, apertures, camera makes etc) Some of them don’t even qualify as per competition rules. Competition rules were, photo must not be older than an year - one of the photos was taken in 2005, Photos must be of >300dpi - most varied from 72dpi to 180dpi (I’ve no clue why they kept this stupid rule, but its a rule !!!) Photos must be original - Some of them got Photoshop CS2 tag and one of them looked too good to be original (for Canon Powershot G3)

But, I should accept that some of them were classic and they remind me that I should learn a lot before trying to compete with them. Well, I’m going to give them a tough competition next year.