Magpie's Recipes: Announcing food photography event DMBLGIT (Does My Blog Look Good In This?) April 2011 edition

Update: Winners have been announced here

I am so thrilled to be hosting one of my most favourite events this month! I've had such a hard time keeping my excitement levels under control!

"Does My Blog Look Good in This?" popularly known as DMBLGIT is a food photography contest or rather THE food photography contest, which was started in 2005 by Andrew of SpittoonExtra. It's best described as a monthly food and drink photography event open to all bloggers who have posted a food photograph on their blogs during the previous month. At least 6 awards are given each month based on scoring of photographs in the 3 categories of edibility, aesthetics, and originality by 5 judges.

This month I have the honor of having a group of really AWESOME people who have graciously agreed to judge the event: Zoe Francois of Zoe Bakes and cook book author of the Bread in 5 series, food bloggers and friends Ria Mathew of Ria's Collection and Shaheen Peerbhai of The Purple Foodie, and food photographer Dario Milano of Food Pixels. Helene Dujardin of My Tartlette, who is also launching a much awaited book on food photography and styling Plate to Pixel will choose her favourite picture, from those that didn't make it to the winning list, but received high scores from the other judges.

Do check out last month's breathtaking winning entries and gallery of all the spectacular entries over at the awesomely talented and sweet Xiaolu's site 6Bittersweets for some inspiration. Let me warn you though, you may experience awe, food cravings and a strong desire to bite your computer screen!

General DMBLGIT Rules:

Only one food/drink photograph may be entered per person.

The photograph must have been taken by you.

The photograph must have been posted on your blog between March 1st through March 31st, 2011.

The deadline to submit your entry is April 20, 2011 at midnight, whenever that is in your part of the world.

Scoring:

The Panel of judges will choose 6 winners based on the following criteria:

Aesthetics: composition, food styling, lighting, focus, etc.
Edibility: does the photo make us want to take a big bite out of our computer monitor while drooling on our keyboard?
Originality: a photo that makes you stop, look twice, and think “Wow! I never thought of photographing it like that before.”

Three overall winners will be selected plus one in each of the 3 categories. Apart from this one photo that stands out, but wasn’t chosen as a winner will also be picked usually by the host, but thankfully the lovely Helene who is a much more qualified person for that job, will be doing it this month! My post announcing the winners for this month will be published by May 1, 2011

How to Enter DMBLGIT:

Send an e-mail with "DMBLGIT Entry" as the subject line to me at magpiemails [at] gmail [dot] com. In your email, please include:

An attachment of a single qualifying food or drink photo you'd like to enter. It should be without text and no more than 500 pixels in width.

Your name

Your blog URL

The title of the image/what it is

The URL of the post containing the photograph

The camera and lens you used

Please also mention if you are a professional photographer or an amateur

Photographs will be loaded into this gallery in Picasa as I receive them. If you don't get an acknowledgment from me within 72 hours of sending your entry, please leave a message in the comments section of this post. By submitting a photo, entrants agree to their photo being redisplayed and altered in size on the host’s page and on the SpittoonExtra DMBLGIT page.

If you have any questions about this month's event, please feel free to email me. Anyone with interest in hosting a future edition of DMBLGIT should email Andrew with "DMBLGIT Host" as the subject.

I can't wait to see each and every one of your beautiful entries!

Update: Winners have been announced here