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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2005-01-31
Students: Be the envy of your classmates.
Nikon and SportsShooter.com announce a new contest for students and their portfolios.
By Grover Sanschagrin, SportsShooter.com
One of the best parts of my job here at SportsShooter.com is being the one who gets to write the special announcements when we launch a new section or do something dramatic to the website.
It doesn't happen very often, but it's happening today.
Thanks to some incredible support from Nikon, we're able to announce a whole new section of the website: The SportsShooter.com Student Portfolio of the Year Contest.
This new section is designed to give our student-members quality feedback in two critical areas: Their daily shooting and their portfolios.
Based on feedback and reviews from the SportsShooter.com membership, as well as a smaller, carefully selected group of members, students who participate in this new contest will have the opportunity to get more honest, direct, and productive feedback than they've ever received anywhere else.
Here's how this section works...
A student member will enter their portfolio into this new section. This is their "ticket in". Included in this process is a step where they choose up to five (5) portfolio reviewers from a list of ‘official' portfolio reviewers.
Once their portfolio has been entered and their student status has been confirmed, they can begin competing in the monthly "One Week's Work" contest - which is part of this section as well. (The student's portfolio will remain hidden from public view up until the moment that they win first place in the "One Week's Work" contest.)
A student will enter their best one-week's (any 7-day span) worth of work from the previous month, and similar to the way the clip contest works, members of SportsShooter.com will leave comments and assign a score to the images submitted.
The student who receives the highest score each month will then have their portfolio reviewed by one of the five people who they have selected from the list of reviewers.
In addition, to provide a consistent voice to this review process, Jim McNay, of Brooks Institute of Photography, will also review the portfolio of each winner, each month.
Once completed, these reviews will be posted on the public area of SportsShooter.com, and the winning student will receive an invitation to compete in the final phase: the end-of-year portfolio contest.
Before they enter this final phase, these students will have the opportunity to make improvements to their portfolios (hopefully using the suggestions feedback they've received during the reviewing process.)
This portion of the contest will be judged by a specially selected (not yet chosen) panel of judges who will review all 12 of the portfolios, and the winner will receive a Nikon D2x -- and the distinguished title as the creator of the "SportsShooter.com Student Portfolio of the Year."
Prizes. Nikon has come through with a boatload of prizes for this section. Aside from the Grand Prize D2x, a special soon-to-be-announced extremely generous gift will be presented to each monthly winner.
This means that, even if you're not a student, you can still end up winning a prize from Nikon just for spending some time giving a student your honest (always constructive, right?) feedback.
So, let's recap the whole process is easy-to-understand outline form:
Step 1: Students register for this section, and enter their portfolios.
Step 2: Students then enter work produced during any 7-day period (in a row) of the previous month in the "One Week's Work" portion of the contest.
Step 3: The SportsShooter.com members review the "One Week's Work" entries, assign first, second, and third places to the entries.
Step 4: At Midnight (US Eastern time) on the last day of each month, the winners are calculated, and the first, second, and third place winners are displayed on the website. The first place winner, and a randomly selected SportsShooter.com member reviewer will be sent a special soon-to-be-announced extremely generous gift from Nikon.
Step 5: The student who wins first place (each month) has their portfolio reviewed by Jim McNay of Brooks Institute and a person whom they've selected from our list of reviewers. This person is also invited to participate in the end-of-year Student Portfolio of the Year competition.
Step 6: The 12 winning students (one from each month of the calendar year) improves their already-awesome portfolio based on the feedback they've received, and a panel of highly respected judges will rate them all at the end of the year. The winning student gets the Nikon D2x.
Get it? It's cool, isn't it?
Now here's where I get to thank the people who made this possible.
Let's start with, Nikon and Mike Corrado. Mike, who has been a SportsShooter.com fanatic for years, has been a pleasure to work with throughout the past several months that we've been developing the new section.
Nikon's support of SportsShooter.com; the SportsShooter.com Student Portfolio of the Year contest; and of students in general gets a huge collective thumbs-up from us (the administrators of SportsShooter.com.)
I am one lucky guy because I can turn a half-baked idea over to our webmaster, Jason Burfield, and he'll actually code it into a real live functioning product. This particular product took us several months to build, and probably contains more code than the rest of the website combined.
Thanks Burf, I know I don't say that enough. (Burf, on the other hand, would like to give thanks to "Geddy Lee, Neil Peart and Alex Lifeson, and vintage RUSH from the 70's to get me through this nightmare.")
Finally, thanks must go to the best beta tester that Burf and I have worked with to date: Michael Treola. This section is better, faster, and tighter because of your attention to detail and your dedication to SportsShooter.com.
Of course, the members of this fine community deserve a round of thanks as well. It's because of all of you, and your passion for SportsShooter.com, that has attracted such an impressive lineup of sponsors – all willing to do whatever it takes to keep this site thriving.
It's good to be here.
Related Links:
Student Portfolio of the Year Contest
Enter this contest
Say thanks to Mike, please
NikonPro.com
NikonDigitalUSA.com
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