Shifting Baselines Blog

8/2 - SB PHOTO CONTEST RESULTS: The drama of coral decline

Today we announced the results of our little experiment called, "The Shifting Baselines Photo and Caption Contest," which we pulled together rather quickly with little knowledge of how to run a contest other than what we knew from last year's Comedy Contest. It turned out great, with nearly 100 submissions from 18 countries.

The first thing we had to do, as submissions started coming in, was add the, "...and Caption ..." bit. Some people were just sending in random diving photos that had nothing to do with S.B. But as soon as we did that, everyone seemed to get the message and the submissions started getting very interesting and illustrative of ocean decline. Still not sure how many of them illustrate "shifting baselines" exactly, if you consider that SB basically means the failure to notice change. But that's okay. It also means lowered standards, and ocean decline in general is an aspect of this.

What is most interesting is that the five judges, who spanned a fairly wide range of professions (from photographer to scientist to television producer) were in very close agreement in their choices. The first two places were at the top of almost all of their lists and were thus way ahead of the rest of the pack. Which means they opted a bit more for substance over style since neither of the sets of coral photos are particularly artsy. I think the judges were all just deeply moved by the whole idea of losing beautiful coral reefs.

For us, the two top choices are great. For over a year we have been holding up our coral reef lenticular images as the trademark of our project. Now, at last, we have before/after images from real coral reefs that show what we're talking about. They don't include the fish, but the coral heads they show are very long-lived making their death all the more dramatic.

Overall, the contest was a great success and clearly prompted a lot of people to do a lot of deep thinking about ocean decline. We received some great e-mails and saw some great comments about it on a number of internet forums and chatrooms. We're interested to hear your thoughts on the winners, and we're already starting to think about running the contest again next year but on a larger scale with a few more months of submission time. We'll let you know if we do.

Thanks for taking part.

Personally, this was my favorite submission, but for some reason it
didn't make the Finalists (from Sona Sandalian of Laredo, Tx.)

Posted by Randy Olson at August 2, 2004 10:21 AM