Rules

We Follow The Artists Bill of Rights Guidelines

General Submission Rules

Enter your submissions online via our entry form.
Entries must follow the competition theme.
All competitions are open to both amateur and professional artists.
Competitions are international.
Contestants must 18 years old to participate and shall not be on the staff of The Motif Collective or an immediate family member of the staff.
Image Files must be in JPG format.
Files may not exceed 1MB and should be approximately 1200x900 in jpg format only.
No watermarks of any kind can be placed on the submissions.
Images must have been created using photographs taken by the entrant. AI images or parts of them worked into a photograph are not allowed.
Please retain your original digital file as it may be required to prove authenticity.
An image that won a Cash Award in a previous Motif Collective competition is not eligible for another Cash Award.
Refunds will only be issued before a competition has ended or if the competition was cancelled as noted below.

Unacceptable Content

The Motif Collective reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to disqualify any entry:

That contains or is solely AI generated content.
That contains threatening, false, misleading, abusive, harassing, libelous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, scandalous, inflammatory, pornographic or profane content.
That contains any material that could constitute or encourage conduct which would be considered a criminal offence, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any law.

You agree to fully indemnify The Motif Collective and its sponsors in respect of all costs owing to any person or entity arising by reason of Your breaching any of the foregoing.

Your Copyright and Moral Rights

The Motif Collective respects Your rights and does not claim copyright for works You submit to this contest, You will retain full copyright in each entry. In addition your moral rights are respected and whenever your work is published by The Motif Collective, You will be credited. Failure to publish a credit due to error or oversight shall not be deemed a breach of this condition.

Copyright and Permissions

By submitting works to this contest you confirm that for each work submitted:

You alone are the author of your work and that it is your original work.
You are the sole copyright holder.
You have not licensed any rights in the work that conflict with the usage rights required by The Motif Collective.
You have the permission of any persons in the work, or if they are under 16, the consent of their parent or guardian, to grant the usage rights required by The Motif Collective.
That it does not include trademarks, contract rights, or any other intellectual property rights of any other third person or entity.
That it does not contain names, likenesses, or other characteristics identifying celebrities or other public figures, living or dead.
You will be responsible for any claim made by any third party in respect of Your entry and to fully indemnify The Motif Collective and its sponsors in respect of all royalties, fees and any other monies owing to any person or entity by reason of Your breaching any of the foregoing.

The Motif Collective reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to disqualify any entry that does not comply with any of the above, even after the entry is submitted on the competition website.

Judging

Entries will be judged on the basis of creativity, composition, technical ability, originality, interpretation of the theme. The judges' decision is final and unsuccessful entrants will not be contacted. Feedback will not be provided except as noted on the specific Competition Submission form.

Each entrant will be judged based on the creative merit of the image submitted and three entries will be selected to become the winners.
Winners will be notified within 7 days of their award and prize by email.
All prizes will be awarded to the person named on the entry.
Winners and Shortlisted images will be published in the Motif Gallery.

Award Money

All Awards will be transferred to winners via a Paypal account, no other means of payment will be considered. Any fees incurred during foreign currency transfers may be deducted from the winning amount. We do not have any control over currency exchange rates and they will fluctuate everyday. All winners will be notified within 7 days of contest closing dates and will have 45 days to provide The Motif Collective with a valid PayPal address for awards distribution. Multiple emails (weekly) will be sent to non-respondents and if after 45 days no response is provided that Individuals Award will be forfeited.

The more Photographers the greater the competition and the larger the prize. Cash Awards are directly related to how competitive the Theme is and how many entries it receives, the more contestants there are in a Competition Theme the larger the payout prizes will be.

1st Place - Receives 25% of all entry fees in the Theme
2nd Place - Receives 15% of all entry fees in the Theme
3rd Place - Receives 10% of all entry fees in the Theme

Sponsor Prizes 

Most of our sponsor prizes will be award-able on an international level, if they are not we will add a notification to the awards listings on the Motif site pages. Sponsor prizes are not required to be used by the winners if they do not have an interest or a need in the offering and they are non-transferable to a party other than the Motif winner. In the event that we have a repeat first place winner who has already won Sponsor Software that is part of the current prize package we may move that prize to another one of winners for that month.

Contest Dates and Deadlines

Dates and deadlines will be posted on each contest announcement page.

Consent Agreement

By entering this contest You agree that any (winning or shortlisted) work You submit may be used by The Motif Collective solely for marketing and promotional purposes of this contest or future contests and no other purpose, these uses include:

Judging the competition
Displaying the entries on the competition website
Inclusion within any materials promoting the competition organized by The Motif Collective

You hereby grant The Motif Collective a non-exclusive, revocable license in each Entry throughout the world in all media for the uses described in above following the date of announcement of the winners.

You acknowledge your responsibility for protecting your Entry against misuse by third parties. The Motif Collective and its Partners can assume no responsibility and are not liable for any misuse of your work by third parties.

Although it is unlikely, should any uses of the work beyond those needed to promote the contest arise you will be contacted and given the opportunity to negotiate any such usage with the parties concerned independently of the competition.

Privacy and Payment Security

We will not pass your personal details on to any third party; however your details may be used to contact you about future Motif Collective Competitions.

All of our payment forms are hosted on separate SSL servers that are both BAA (HIPAA) and PCI (DSS) level 1 compliant.
Your credit card data is never transmitted, processed, or stored by any website or the secure forms.
All sensitive transaction data is transmitted directly from your browser for secure processing.
Our Data Processing Addendum (DPA) Agreement may be viewed here.

Right to Cancel

The Motif Collective reserves the right to cancel a competition at its own discretion if not capable of continuing as planned for any reason beyond our control. If a competition is cancelled we will refund the entry fee to all entrants for the cancelled competition and we will not reserve the right to use any of the submitted images.

Taxes and Laws

Motif Collective International Photography Awards participation is Void where prohibited. All Federal, State and Local Taxes associated with the receipt of any Award is solely the responsibility of the winner.