With all due respect to the folks who think that a line of text shouldn't have any part in a photo contest, aren't photos like paintings or other works of art that are given names or captions?
Life Magazine photos always used to have captions and many works of art in museums have names.
Why shouldn't entrants be allowed to creatively caption, name or simply describe the subject of their photo? Because of fear that some folks might go overboard or because others have a philosophy of all or nothing? That not only seems to be impractical, but being overly restrictive is not what having the freedom to help make our own rules should be about.
The original rules didn't allow captioning, but it was allowed because it made sense and didn't hurt the spirit of the contest. And now we're trying to fix the wording of the rule so that a caption or description isn't confused with allowing an entry that's too much like a commercial ad and less like a purely artistic photo.
Rather than vote for all or nothing, I'm voting for the compromise solution to correct the wording of the rules. It's the same kind of compromise that led to passing the U.S. Constitution which created the two chambers of Congress, the House of Representatives based on population and the Senate based on 2 Senators per state in an equal fashion a.k.a. the Connecticut Compromise.
Now at least an entrant can name, caption or describe their photo which should suffice for most every practical & artistic purpose, and is preferable to allowing computer generated text to be added to a photo.
Thanks for letting me voice my opinion.
Since I missed the first discussion thread I now feel much better and more certain about the reasoning behind my vote.
