KHU is hosting a photo contest called Capture the Moment.
The idea is to help organize the best still photographs of our sport in one place. I’m also looking for great photos to use at krisholm.com and on calendars and posters, and want to offer some prize incentives for that.
Here is how it will work: you will be able to upload your best photos to the site. Everyone visiting the site can vote for their favorite photos in a category (e.g. action, adventure, etc). At the end of the competition, the person who captured the most votes for their photo wins a prize.
Big thanks go to Carl Hoyer for masterminding the site architecture, and to Unicycle.com for helping with prize sponsorship.
A word of advice to all you would-be shutterbugs. If you want to land on a KH poster, set your camera to the highest resolution possible. Even after doing that, many photos still won’t be hi-res enough to enlarge for a poster - or even a decent sized calendar.
Being in the printing business, I see this problem all the time - a great photo that isn’t used because it doesn’t have the proper resolution to be enlarged to the desired output size.
In most commercial photo contests, the entrants must sign away the rights to the photos. What will be the situation for this contest? I still hold out hope that another Powerade or other company will be interested in my shots in the future and I want to still be the owner.
And for your end, whatever agreement that gets used should include the right for you (KH, UDC or other contest owners) to use winning shots for your own promotion as well, and of course to display the winning entries. Usually for that there is some sort of agreement for limited rights. If you want to know more I can try to find the proper wording and email it over…
As a condition of entry, the entrant agrees to let KHU use the shots, such as for the website, posters, support for KH distributors etc.
There will an optional voluntary agreement that the entrant could agree to if they wanted, which would let KHU additionally submit good photos to magazines or other print media (not sell them, just submit them, and if I thought perhaps the magazine had budget for photos, I’d try to refer them back to the original rights holder). In the latter case, the intent is help gain exposure for our sport by making it easy and free for magazines to publish them. On this note, one of the reasons the biketrials rider Hans Rey became so famous was because he often secured rights to his own photos, organized them, and sent them to magazines in a way that made it easy and free for the magazine to use. But to be clear, that would be voluntary on the part of the photographer.
Non of this involves giving up rights to your own photos; in other words entering the contest does not mean that you couldn’t publish your photos elsewhere.
We haven’t pinned down all details, but likely the contest period would run every 6 months or so, and entrants would be limited to a handful of photos each 6 month period. These details will be confirmed shortly.
You’ll have to consider whether the photos have model releases; it’s a pain, but probably a requirement to use most of the images commercially. The photographer can’t give away the rights of the person in the image.
Yup, what Tom said is true. Depending on usage, having a recognizable person in the picture gets restrictive if you don’t have a model release. If it’s for journalistic use, no problem. But for commercial use, problem.
Actually no. I’m not going to put any brand restriction on photo submissions. In certain commercial ways it might make sense to be restrictive, but I think it would be in a better spirit of our sport to open it up.
Otherwise there will be some basic groundrules (e.g. to avoid obscene or completely off-topic photos) but that’s about it.
Yes, there will be a few categories. I’m also hoping that the contest brings out aspects of our sport that sometimes lend themselves better to photos than video, such as distance riding, XC muni, and natural terrain trials.
No way, there’s a ton of people who post awesome shots! Also, I’m sure someone who doesn’t post all the time is going to really surprise us all with some amazing stuff.
To let you know on the Capture The Moment photo website. The project is going very well but we missed today’s launch date. We expect it to go live about September 8. Will post as soon as it launches. You can also sign up for an update at capture.krisholm.com.
