This post will hopefully shed a little light on the growth of photo competitions that have goals other than celebrating talent or promoting photography.

The first type of competition are simple money earners for the organizers. These competitions will charge a fee  per entrant or per image with the opportunity to win big prizes. Of course, someone will win the photo safari to Africa but if they get thousands of entrants at 50 dollars each the organizers will have made a healthy profit.

The second type of competition is more insidious and it involves what is known in the industry as ” a rights grab.” The organization announces a competition which may have some great prizes and no entry fee. However, when you read the fine print, it says that by submitting the photograph to the organizers you are giving them some degree of ownership of the image rights. You may be giving them permission to use the image to promote the competition (which is reasonable) but you may also have allowed them to sell that image to other websites or magazines for a fee from which you, the photographer, will not receive any payment. This may go a stage further with the competition organizer submitting your images to various stock agencies and again taking all the licensing fees. The copyright of the image may still belong to the photographer but suddenly their fantastic image has become the generic shot seen everywhere.

As an example, here’s the fine print in a Lonely Planet photo competition. Note that  on the entry form it automatically ticks the box next to “Grant Lonely Planet a General License to use my image(s)” And what is a General License…

Lonely Planet Photo Competition Fine Print

Compare this to the fine print for the Travel Photographer of the Year competition which states:

Fine Print from the Travel Photographer of the Year Competition

The Travel Photographer of the Year is well worth checking out even if it’s just for inspiration, there are always great entries. Another fantastic photo competition (that doesn’t try to grab image rights) is the Wildlife Photographer of the Year.