Competition FAQ

• How to upload images to a CAPA Competition

It is extremely important to read and comply with all the details contained in the competition detail webpage prior to entering an image.

The Judging Panel may disqualify your image if it does meet the competition details webpage.

You should not be solely focused on winning a CAPA Award. Instead, it is more realistic to strive to have your images scored within the top 20% of a competition. By being in the top 20%, the Judging Panel felt that your submitted images contained no significant flaws or contains all the key components of a good image.

When an image doesn’t place in the top 20% then it becomes a self-reflecting moment to analyze your image to identify what elements or techniques could be enhanced.

Shortly before and after the ‘closing-date’ of each competition, your submitted images will be pre-screened to ensure they met the Scope of Competition. If issues or concerns are discovered, you will suggest asked to make the necessary changes or replace the image prior to the ‘day-of-judging.’
On the ‘day-of-judging,’ the Judging Panel will review and score your images based on the Scope of Competition and the details contained in our CAPA Eligibility Criteria webpage.

Images that fail to meet these two components may be disqualified by the Judging Panel provided that the majority of judges are in agreement.

The decisions made and scores assigned by the Judging Panel cannot be appealed.

For all competitions, the Judging Panel will award a gold, silver and bronze medal to an entrant which receives the three highest accumulated scores. In addition, they will award a 1st, 2nd and 3rd Merit Award to the three highest scoring individual images. No ties are permitted for the medal and merit awards. Therefore, the Judging Panel will break all ties to establish the final winners.

In breaking a tie for a medal or merit, the Judging Panel will be presented with the tied images and will be asked to rank their choice of images (ie – 1st choice, 2nd choice, etc….). Images gaining the highest choice total will be the winner of the tie. All medal and merit ties will be listed in the final competition report along with the image breaking the tie.

Eight to ten percent of the total entrants will receive a Honourable Mention Ribbon which will be awarded by the Director of Competitions.

Final Competition Report and winning images will be posted on the CAPA website. Winning images will be open for public viewing. However, the final competition results can only be viewed by logging into the CAPA website and selecting the Competition Reports option from the Competitions dropdown menu. If you cannot see the Competition Reports option, you are not logged into the CAPA website.

The final competition report and images will also be sent to the editor-in-chief of our Canadian Camera magazine for possible inclusion in a forthcoming magazine edition.

As outlined in the CAPA Eligibility Criteria webpage, the submitted images should be recent. The determination of what is a recent image is left to the good judgement of the individual photographer.

No. Your image has been recognized and honoured with a CAPA award. Therefore, you must submit another image for the respective competition. The Director of Competitions maintains a database of past winners/images and will review this database prior to approving competition results.

Yes, you can use any photo-editing software to perform post-processing on your image. However, the limitations in using post-processing are outlined in each competition’s Editing Criteria. Exceeding the competition specifications will result in the image being disqualified and the competition results will be re-sorted.

No. Images will not be accepted for a competition after the ‘closing-date.’ Only exception is with the approval of the CAPA Director of Competitions.

The two following points contained within the CAPA Eligibility Criteria addresses this question:

• they will NOT enter an identical or substantially the same image more than once into the same CAPA competition (‘individual‘ and/or ‘club‘ categories). ONLY EXCEPTION is for a submission into the Audio Visual Presentation Competition.
• they will NOT enter an identical or substantially the same image into a CAPA competition in which the image has previously received a CAPA Award. Images in a series with only slight variations will be considered substantially the same image. An image rotated, flipped, re-formatted or converted to monochrome will be deemed substantially the same image.