Information about the EGU Photo Competition

Eligibility

Every EGU General Assembly participant, pre-registered for the conference by 28 March, can submit up to three photos and one moving image (see format below) on any broad theme related to the Earth, space and planetary sciences. To submit images for the competition, you must register in Imaggeo. You must also be the author of any photographs/moving images you enter into the competition.

Winners of last year's competition and those judging the photos and moving images in a given year are excluded from the competition. Other participants who are attending the EGU General Assembly with a free registration pass in a given year are not eligible to take part in the competition that year.

Please note that only images that are not already in the Imaggeo database are eligible.

Opening and deadline

The competition opens for submissions from 22 January to 28 March, prior to the General Assembly. You can enter a photo or moving image into the competition by uploading it to Imaggeo and electing to include it in the EGU Photo Competition (a submission check box will appear when editing the image’s information). In certain years, there may be an additional prize related to the theme of the EGU General Assembly; to enter your themed photo to this prize, make sure to select the appropriate check box when editing the image’s information.

Copyright

If you submit your images to the annual EGU Photo Competition, you agree to include them in Imaggeo, the EGU’s online geosciences image and video repository. If your photo or moving image is selected by the competition judges, you also agree for it to be exhibited at the EGU General Assembly.

All geoscientists (and others) can submit their photographs and videos to Imaggeo and, since it is an open access repository, these submissions can be used for free by scientists for their presentations or publications, by educators and the general public, and some images can even be used freely for commercial purposes.

All the material in this database is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence, which means that Imaggeo content is owned by the individual creators and that they must always be credited when their content is used. People interested in submitting material to Imaggeo can also choose a more restrictive licence, such as the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 licence. For more information please check the Copyright page.

Further information on copyright

Format

Photos should be in jpg, png, tiff, gif, webp, avif, heic format. For 4:3 pictures, the resolution should be 1500 x 1125 pixels, minimum. Moving images should be 5-30 seconds in duration and should consist of a continuous, unedited video clip. The maximum file size for images or videos is 100 MB.

Procedure and judging criteria

After the submission page is closed, there is a two-stage selection process.

In the first stage, a panel is set up to select ten finalist photographs and the best moving image. The panel consists of the winners from last year’s competition (if they agree) plus three or more people from within the EGU. The judges select the finalist images taking the following points into account:

• The overall aesthetics of the image;
• The uniqueness of the storytelling content of the image, especially with respect to the geoscientific information content;
• The technical quality of the image (with respect to exposure, noise, grain, foreground/background sharpness, dynamic range, no skewed horizon, no burnt highlights, and others);
• The composition of the image (including horizon positioning, golden cuts, no cut image content, leading lines);
• The quality of the metadata associated with the image, including an informative description and appropriate title.

In the second stage, the finalist photographs are exhibited during the General Assembly of that year. Each participant of the Assembly can then vote for up to three of their favourite exhibited photos using voting terminals set up next to the exhibition area. The public voting takes place from 8 am on Monday to midnight on Thursday. The votes are counted automatically and the three photographs with the highest number of votes are the winners. The winning photos are announced on Friday morning of the conference, at the EGU booth and through the Geolog.

In the moving image competition and the EGU General Assembly theme prize, the winner is selected by the judges and exhibited at the General Assembly.

Please note that 20 or more images have to be submitted to the moving image competition and to the General Assembly theme prize for each award to be granted. In the case of the standard photo competition, where three awards are granted, the minimum number of entries is 60. The judging panel reserves the right to award an image of exceptional quality even if the minimum number of entries to a competition is not reached.

Awards

The three winners of the photo competition, the winner of the EGU General Assembly theme prize and the winner of the moving image prize will get free registration for the EGU General Assembly. This award is not transferable and can only be used in the year following the competition. Winners are also invited to be part of the judging panel of the following competition. All photographers that have images selected for the second stage, as well as the winner of the moving image prize and EGU General Assembly theme prize, get a free EGU merchandise item.