Contest Submission Questions

I'm interested in entering a photo contest.  It's a relatively small contest, first prize is something like $300 and publication in a magazine / journal.  Guidelines say to submit no more than 3 "high quality jpegs."  (I am aware of copyright ownership and publication rights, etc.)  I emailed their "contact us" email address for submission guidelines clarification re: fie size, pixel dimensions, etc. and got no response.  I've previously entered a few more serious contests, and submission guidelines were much clearer.  If you were to enter this contest, would you send the file at 100% size?  Sharpened for display at that image size?  (I'm thinking that would look terrible printed; again, I don't know if they're going to want a RAW file or file worked up for print.)  Obviously i don't enter a lot of contests, and there's not a lot riding on this, but it would be a kick for me, as a hobbyist, so why not?

A couple of times I've submitted images for a regional calendar.  They have never given very good instructions especially for pixel dimensions.  What I did was to look at one of their past calendars to see what the maximum printed size would be.  I then resized my images at 300 ppi to those dimensions, e.g. 6" x 9" at 300 ppi would be a 1800 x 2700 pixel image (I left the images in their native aspect ratio and they cropped them to fit).  You wouldn't want to send the RAW files, and go easy on the sharpening as I believe most publications would sharpen to their needs.  Send them a max quality JPEG in sRGB (or Adobe RGB if they'll take that).

Thanks, Alan!

If they don't specify, provide images that are 3300 pixels along the longest size. This allows them to print an image full page in a magazine without having to resize or interpolate the image. While DPI/PPI doesn't matter for a digital submission, if the goal is print as you specified then providing it at 300 DPI/PPI is a good idea. So what I would do with such vagueness, provide the image at 3300 pixels, 300 DPI and in the sRGB color space. Provide it as a JPEG set to the highest quality level (12 in Photoshop).

Thank you, E.J.