Guidelines:
Some of these are optional, some advisable. Following these guidelines makes the challenges more fun and fosters a team spirited, friendly atmosphere
* Try to include exif information: the easiest way, with a digital camera, is to use the save as option in Photoshop, as this will automatically include the relevant details. If you are using a film camera, try to remember some of the basic details like lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO etc and add them manually in the challenge gallery (more on this later). It makes it interesting for others, especially for those technical freaks who would love to know exactly what you did. However, if you don’t have the information, don’t stress but do be honest: the rules state that the picture has to be taken within the shooting period and including EXIF data is the best way of demonstrating this.
* If you have any other details, like printing techniques, digital editing etc. then please feel free to include those too.
* It’s encouraging and useful to others to add comments in the appropriate section under those images which evoke a response from you.
* If you enjoy the galleries, think about voting, even if you haven’t entered.
* You don’t absolutely have to vote for both galleries if you’ve only entered one, but it’s a great gesture to vote for both.
Uploading to the Leica Challenge Galleries:
First you need to prepare your image for the galleries using your image editing software. This is how you would do it in Photoshop. Convert your image to profile (using sRGB works well) by going: image>mode>convert to profile. Then change the image size to fit the rules: image>size. Save as jpeg in file menu>save as, then make sure the slider is set so that the value at the bottom doesn’t exceed the filse size as specified in the rules.
Now go to www.pbase.com/leica_forum
* If you are already a PBase user, log out before trying to upload to the Challenge galleries. You can’t upload from your personal account.
* Go to the above link. You will see a page entitled The Challenges; it has a black background and shows brightly coloured thumbnails for all the challenges so far.
* Select login at the top right of the page. This will take you to the login page. Ignore the rest of the login page; the only part that concerns you is the small section at the top left which gives you the option to insert a username and password.
* Enter the username name and password (the moderator will make these available at the top of each new challenge thread in Dpreview) then click the login button: it can sometimes take more than one attempt to log in, so try again if it doesn't work the first time.
* Once you are logged in, use the back button on your browser to return to the challenges page, then refresh the page.
* Click the thumbnail for the current challenge, which will take you into the galleries page.
* Click on the thumbnail for the gallery you want to upload to.
* Go to the string of blue script at the top of the page and click on edit this gallery.
* This takes you to a different page, with a white background and blue trim. Scroll down past the block of information outlined in blue till you come to a section entitled Upload Photos to this Gallery. You will see a radio button with rounded ends, which says Choose file. Clicking this button will allow you to navigate your hard drive till you find the location of the image you want to upload. Click this image, click choose, then look on the PBase page and you will see, below Choose file, another radio button that says Upload image. Click this then watch the progress bar in your browser till you can see the image has completed loading.
* Now return to the gallery, refreshing the page if necessary. You should see a thumbnail for your image.
* Click the thumbnail to see the full size image.
* At this stage you will be missing some of the information your picture needs, so go up to the top and click edit image. This will take you to a page which contains a thumbnail of your picture, plus various boxes for you to fill in.
* Fill in the title section with your picture’s title and put your name in the artist box. You can put a bit of interesting info in the caption section if you like, then fill in the other details in the relevant spaces. If you used a digital camera, many of the details such as date, ISO etc will already be filled in for you, and there are drop down boxes for some of the others.
* When you’ve finished, click the update image radio button, then go back to the gallery, refresh the page and look at your picture.
That’s about it. If you get lost, email the current moderator through Dpreview!
