[barondla]

Welcome everyone. We recently started discussing this in Point & Shoot Competition #168 thread. This provides a more visible place to discuss the Point & Shoot Competition.

As pointed out in thread #168, I started the contest 168 months ago. I'm happy it has had such a long life, and enjoy participating and seeing other images.

THEN:

I had several reasons for starting the contest. The main reason was I liked shooting and discussing small cameras. Adam was considering closing the Point & Shoot forum due to the low numbers of posts. I thought a competition would show the small cameras had a place and increase posts. Adam gave permission to hold the contest and to let non Pentax cameras enter. As I remember the name changed from Point & Shoot to Compact Camera forum early on. Even in contest #1 there were people that felt PnS was a derogatory term. No idea if this is why Adam changed the forum name. We never changed the contest name.

Other reasons for starting the contest were Pentax had many trendsetting designs. They deserved a place to shine. It would have been a shame for Adam to close the forum for lack of traffic. I also wanted a simpler contest structure than the big "official" PentaxForums contest. I had very slow dial up internet (disadvantage of living in the boonies). It took ages to download a page with all those pictures. I never participated in them.

NOW:

Pentax and many other companies no longer have compact cameras. Pentax has even abandoned the Q. The local big box store hasn't had a Canon Elph in over 6 months. We saw this coming years ago and opened up our contest to larger non interchangeable film cameras and phones. We also upped the digital sensor size.

I mostly shoot the Pentax Q as my compact camera. My Pentax A10/40 compacts have quit working. The Canon Elphs need new batteries. The Panasonic LX2 and Olympus 5050 might still work.

Would moving the contest get more entries? Don't know. Contest wasn't big when it matched the name of its location and more people were using compact cameras. Moving it might help or kill it. There are other ideas we could try. I still enjoy the competition. What are your thoughts?

Thanks,

barondla

[Dartmoor Dave]

I do most of my digital shooting with compact cameras nowadays, usually with an Optio W30 when it's wet outside and a Lumix TZ70 when it's dry (I've gone back to using large interchangeable lens cameras for film only). But I've never entered the point-and-shoot competition because I'm just not the competitions type. I don't think of photography (or forum discussions) as a contest that someone has to win.

I do post in the toy cameras thread in the non-Pentax subforum, but I tend not to look in the compact cameras subforum itself because it's limited specifically to Pentax cameras. And as you say, Pentax doesn't do any compacts nowadays. If it did, I'd probably be using one. I only saw this thread because it happened to be on the recent threads list when I logged on.

Perhaps what the forum needs is a general, non brand specific area for discussions about compact cameras and phone cameras of all types. Maybe call it the "Small Sensor Cameras and Phones" subforum for anything under APS-C size? Then members could talk about how to get the best results out of whichever small sensor cameras they like to use, whether it's a compact or a cell phone or a small sensor ILC. That way you might get more entries for the monthly competition, because a subforum for all sorts of small sensors would get more visitors, if the existing phone and toy camera threads in the non-Pentax subforum were moved there.

[Cipher]

Perhaps what the forum needs is a general, non brand specific area for discussions about compact cameras and phone cameras of all types. Maybe call it the "Small Sensor Cameras and Phones" subforum for anything under APS-C size? Then members could talk about how to get the best results out of whichever small sensor cameras they like to use, whether it's a compact or a cell phone or a small sensor ILC. That way you might get more entries for the monthly competition, because a subforum for all sorts of small sensors would get more visitors, if the existing phone and toy camera threads in the non-Pentax subforum were moved there.

+1 on this.


Maybe call it Phones and Small Sensor Cameras (all brands), that should get a wider response, and even include M4/3. They have their own "club" now, but that would fit in as well. Small sensor photography over the last 10 years or so has grown tremendously.


I think that there are so many people who use their phones in addition to regular cameras that having this section would encourage them.

[Vendee]

Its quite interesting reading the various points of view. Initially I thought the issue was just the competition but I now realise that there are other related issues. I'm not too knowledgeable about the Pentax brand despite owning four film bodies and the GRIII. The GRIII was purchased not out of any brand loyalty but because it was the best compact that met my needs. I hadn't even considered that Pentax didn't make any compacts these day. All those things considered, I can see that the "Pentax Compact Cameras" forum is underused due to a lack of new Pentax compacts. Maybe there is a case for the existing forum to be renamed something like "Compacts and Phones" with a sub forum for the Ricoh GR series and also for legacy Pentax compacts. This would obviously be down to Adam whom I imagine is following this thread.

That still leaves us with the problem of the competition and the lack of entries each month. Would we want to move it to the Challenges forum, include it in a new Compacts/phones forum not exclusive to Pentax models or do we leave things as they are? I can't see me continuing to enter if there are only 3 or 4 entries per month from the same people. I don't think its healthy. Dartmoor Dave said:- " I don't think of photography (or forum discussions) as a contest that someone has to win." For me its not so much the competition or the winning but I enjoy being challenged to to take a photo that someone else has set. Sometimes its hard to know what to go out and photograph so its great when someone else decides for you. I also think that approach encourages you to go out and shoot something new for the competition rather than going through your files to find something you shot years ago but meets the brief. Having said that, my entry for the current competition was taken before David announced the subject but only by 6 days

[Sam_I_am]

I really enjoy this friendly competition. I don't even look at it as a competition, but as incentive to go take pictures that I might not usually think of. What I really like about it is the fact that I don't need specific gear, just my phone. I took part in it for a number of months, but due to some health issues, I missed a number of months. Hopefully I can become more active again no matter where it ends up.

[kwb]

I enjoy seeing what others can achieve by using P&S-type cameras. When many are overly concerned about so-called "image quality" (especially noise), forgetting about that and focusing on other aspects of photography instead somehow makes me feel good. Also, I enjoy "I took this picture just because my eyes caught something interesting and I happened to have a camera" type pictures as much as better-prepared and planned ones, but it's harder to see the former type if your cameras are limited to larger ones like APS-C and FF ILC. P&S competition is a perfect platform to satisfy me.

Apparently the more entrants the merrier. We've been doing OK in the past year except when there were only 3 entrants (which happened once). Twice we had 4 entrants, which was a bit low from my point of view as my personal threshold for good participation is 5. FYI our median number of entrants was 5, mean was something like 5.7. There were 19 individuals who entered at least once in the past 12 competitions, 7 or so are what I see as frequent contributors, some posted a few times, and some posted just once. Composition of this group seems to be about right though the size is a bit small. Given that people have life other than taking pictures, it's natural that we have ups and downs, and a group of 19 cannot always sustain 5 or more entrants per competition.

I'm not necessarily against moving the competition to somewhere else, but at least one person wrote that staying here would be preferable, so here are my ideas.


1. People copy what barondla does. Look at his first post, and an unobtrusive blurb at the end. He does that to his posts regardless of where the post is made. I first got to know about this competition because of that. Whether or not we move the venue, we could do something similar. barondla, how do you do that?

2. The winner posts an advertisement in "Challenges" sub forum each time a new competition starts. We don't move the venue, we just make a thread in "Challenges" subforum to explain what the competition is about, and link to the competition thread in "Pentax Compact Cameras" sub forum. I'm not sure if that is allowed, we should ask Adam.

[Cipher]

I'm not necessarily against moving the competition to somewhere else, but at least one person wrote that staying here would be preferable, so here are my ideas.1. People copy what barondla does. Look at his first post, and an unobtrusive blurb at the end. He does that to his posts regardless of where the post is made. I first got to know about this competition because of that. Whether or not we move the venue, we could do something similar. barondla, how do you do that?2. The winner posts an advertisement in "Challenges" sub forum each time a new competition starts. We don't move the venue, we just make a thread in "Challenges" subforum to explain what the competition is about, and link to the competition thread in "Pentax Compact Cameras" sub forum. I'm not sure if that is allowed, we should ask Adam.

Sounds good, anything to make this "competition" more visible.

[Vendee]

Yeah sounds good. I don't really care where the competition is located as long as we get a decent number of people entering. For me, even 5 participants per competition isn't really healthy. I think there needs to be 10 entrants to actually make it "a competition".

So to recap, I'm fine with keeping it here if we can have links to the competition from elsewhere in Pentax Forums to hook in people who have the gear to enter but might not because it isn't a Pentax Compact.

[barondla]

Reading all the comments and thinking about them. At the moment I'm at work.

To answer kwb's question, it is easy to add text to every post.
At the bottom of this page under Forum Jump select User Control Panel > Edit Signature (in left sidebar under Your Profile). Type in message & click Save Signature button. Message is automatically added to every post you make.

More thoughts when time permits.
Thanks,
barondla

[kwb]

Reading all the comments and thinking about them. At the moment I'm at work.

To answer kwb's question, it is easy to add text to every post.
At the bottom of this page under Forum Jump select User Control Panel > Edit Signature (in left sidebar under Your Profile). Type in message & click Save Signature button. Message is automatically added to every post you make.

More thoughts when time permits.
Thanks,
barondla

Thanks barondla, I'm testing my signature.

[barondla]

Thanks barondla, I'm testing my signature.

Looks great kwb! I took a shot for the contest today. Haven't had a chance to look it over yet.

Thanks,
barondla

[reh321]

I do most of my digital shooting with compact cameras nowadays, usually with an Optio W30 when it's wet outside and a Lumix TZ70 when it's dry (I've gone back to using large interchangeable lens cameras for film only). But I've never entered the point-and-shoot competition because I'm just not the competitions type. I don't think of photography (or forum discussions) as a contest that someone has to win.

I do post in the toy cameras thread in the non-Pentax subforum, but I tend not to look in the compact cameras subforum itself because it's limited specifically to Pentax cameras. And as you say, Pentax doesn't do any compacts nowadays. If it did, I'd probably be using one. I only saw this thread because it happened to be on the recent threads list when I logged on.

When I went digital, I went with a Canon compact camera, with a zoom lens - but within a year I gave the camera to our daughter and purchased a Canon Rebel DSLR for the same reason I had purchased a SLR in the first place - even with a zoom lens, it was simply too confining, too limiting. Ricoh does have several compact cameras these days - such as the GR - but I am sure {since they use a prime lens} that I would find it to also be too limiting. The “Q” has found a place in my cameras as a discrete and light camera, but it does allow me to use various lenses, so I don’t find it to be as limiting as I found compact cameras to be.

[kwb]

2. The winner posts an advertisement in "Challenges" sub forum each time a new competition starts. We don't move the venue, we just make a thread in "Challenges" subforum to explain what the competition is about, and link to the competition thread in "Pentax Compact Cameras" sub forum. I'm not sure if that is allowed, we should ask Adam.

I asked Adam and he doesn't see any problem cross-promoting.
The winner of the Point and Shoot Competition #169 - Transitions -, barondla, will be able to post the advertisement in the Challenges sub-forum.

BTW this doesn't really exclude the possibility of reforming the Pentax Compact Cameras subforum. I'll think about it and post something later.

[barondla]

I asked Adam and he doesn't see any problem cross-promoting.
The winner of the Point and Shoot Competition #169 - Transitions -, barondla, will be able to post the advertisement in the Challenges sub-forum.

BTW this doesn't really exclude the possibility of reforming the Pentax Compact Cameras subforum. I'll think about it and post something later.

Cool! Thanks kwb for communicating with Adam. I've started #170 and posted an ad in the Challenges sub forum. Interested to see what happens.

Thanks,
barondla

[Vendee]

So Barondla set a "No theme, enter anything" subject for the last competition. Now I quite like being set a specific subject because I like being challenged to photograph something that I might not do ordinarily. But....... the last competition seems to have been a success with an increased number of entries. So I was wondering if it would be worth considering doing the "no theme" subject more often? I was thinking perhaps doing it every 4th competition which is 3 times a year. Just putting it out there and I wonder what everyone else thinks.