I am totally unconvinced by Karen's description of the committee's logic.  I
will not be submitting photos, so my remarks are somewhat objective.

If photos are submitted on one or a few disks, they can be copied to one or
several computers into species-specific folders, then copied in
species-specific folders to flash-drives for routing to reviewers.  

I will volunteer my computer and my time for sorting and copying 25% of the
bird species (53) to flash-drives ("memory sticks").  I have 75 GB of hard
disk space available. I estimate, that for high resolution photos in
high-quality (low compression) .jpg files that 300dpi 5x7 inch photos will
be roughly 4MB each in size. Three other volunteers with adequate computer
space for sorting must exist.

I would place numbers before species names on species folders so that
taxonomic order could be maintained for convenience in folder management. (I
already have such a taxon-numbering scheme for MD birds.)

Am I missing something?  How many reviewers must receive copies of any given
species?  The burden of weak logistics planning should not be on the
photographers who volunteer their photos.  Even the request for all required
hardcopy information to be repeated for each photo seems unnecessary; proper
naming of each photo .jpg file would obviate much hard-copy repetition.  The
tedious job of renaming each photo received to include a unique identifier
code for the photographer seems necessary, but doable.

Let's be pragmatic - if the prime photo sources strongly object, something
better must be done.  The potential photo suppliers are volunteers, too.

Bill Ellis
Eldersburg, Carroll Co.
billellis at
ellislist dot com


-----Original Message-----
From: Karen Morley
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 9:47 AM
To: 
Subject: Response to Atlas Photography Contest concerns


... Third, the really big problem..............one species (one photo) per
disk. We know this is burdensome especially for some photographers who may
wish to submit large number of photographs.   We understand that from the
photographers' point of view, it would be much easier to put all the photo
files on one disk.  And we know requiring all these disks is environmentally
questionable.  But after much research and debate, this appears to be the
best method for the committee members who have to organize the photos per
species.  We don't have a home computer that can upload and organize all
these files at the same time.  MOS is not a large conservation or
educational organization with unlimited resources to run this contest. As we
said above, we want to have an unbiased blind selection of the winning
photographs.  In actuality this is 209 small contests - yes, we hope to have
a picture for each bird species in the Atlas. ...