Originally posted by Greyser However, I'm very interested what's going on with PPG.
I started submitting some images again this year. After the summer holidays, I submitted two batches of five images each. 9 of 10 were accepted. I think (hope) the high acceptance rate doesn't mean the standards are lower, but rather reflects my own pickiness (I only submitted images that had gotten positive feedback on e.g. flickr or facebook).
What I've noticed, is that the number of submitted images must be much higher now. I tried very hard to vote until there were nothing left to vote for, but never came to the end. Voting is possibly more of a pain than it used to be, there is really a lot of noise with incredibly bad pictures being submitted (e.g. a whole series of boring and similar images that weren't even rotated correctly!).
After the painful voting experience, I thought that it wouldn't be much of an honor to be accepted in the PPG anymore. But when I had a look at the other images being accepted at the same time as my most recent batch, I was very positively surprised and felt proud to have my work accepted together with the works of much more talented photographers than me. There are still some really outstanding images being added to the PPG!
Another positive experience I had was that 4 out of 9 of the recently accepted images were B+W images - it used to be very hard to get B+W shots accepted in the PPG (check my signature link to the PPG if you're interested in having a look).
....and btw, I'm proud to announce that my 15 year son got his first image accepted, too. This has really sparked his interest in photography, and he's now searching ebay for old macro lenses to use with my old K10D (he borrowed my DA35 Ltd for this shot):
PENTAX : PENTAX Photo Gallery artist page