Introduction:

Every year since 2006 CarNut's Garage has produced a calendar from photographs submitted by MINI owners. This is a quality calendar printed on heavy, glossy 8½ x 11 paper, each month with a full page picture and a full page calendar. It is available for purchase each year around the beginning of December. Photographs used in the calendar are submitted by MINI owners and selected by a contest with anyone who wishes to participate voting during late October and early November. Pictures may be submitted any time during the year, but the official submission period runs from mid-September to mid-October. Exact dates are published each year in September.

Process:

• Pictures must be submitted to CarNut by email or you can send a link to a full resolution image stored somewhere on the web
• Pictures must be in landscape (horizontal) format (wider than tall)
• Pictures should be high resolution to be sharp and clear on the final calendar -
  at least 3 MP
• Preferred resolution is at least 2300 x 1626 pixels, higher resolution is even better
• Please submit unedited, highest resolution original picture so to allow the most flexibility in fitting the pictures to the calendar format
• Pictures will be cropped and/or resized to fit and white space added at the bottom for a caption
• Some photos may be edited to remove extraneous objects, e.g., telephone poles and wires, that detract from the picture
• Pictures can be in almost any format your camera can produce, except for raw formats, but .jpg is preferred
• The primary subject of each photo should be MINI or Mini related - if there is a person, animal, other car, etc., it should be a secondary subject
• By submitting a picture, you are certifying that you give CarNut's Garage the rights to publish the picture in the calendar or, if you did not take the picture yourself, that you have secured the right to publish from the photographer
• CarNut determines in which months the 12 winning pictures appear
• Pictures which have appeared in any previous CarNut's Garage Calendar are not eligible for the calendar in subsequent years, but any previously submitted picture which was not selected for publication in a CarNut's Garage Calendar may be entered
• You can submit as many pictures as you want, but winners are limited to no more than one winning picture per person published in the calendar so as to maximize the number of people who have pictures in the final calendar

• The schedule for submitting pictures is posted each year in September, but pictures can be submitted at any time throughout the year up to the deadline
• Voting takes place in November
• Winners are announced approximately November 15, give or take
• Ordering information for people wishing to purchase calendars is posted in late November

The proportions of most digital camera formats are not the same as needed for the calendar. Some minor cropping is usually necessary to fit pictures to the calendar page.

Submit originals. Please leave any cropping, resizing or color correction to CarNut. If you crop the pictures before you submit them, you reduce the options for composing the pictures to fit the calendar format. You also reduce the overall resolution because you are only sending part of the picture and when it is cropped to fit the calendar format, even more is lost. If you crop your pictures to look "just right" you might be surprised by how it looks after resizing and cropping to fit the calendar format, especially if you send an edited picture that is wider or taller than normal or if you crop to put the MINI right near an edge. The normal aspect ratio for most digital cameras is about 4:3 (digital SLRs tend to be wider still) and that has to be cropped to approximately 4:2.8 for the calendar. If you send something already cropped to much different than that ratio, something will be lost in the final translation or the picture may not even be usable. If you have specific desires to have something in the pic cropped or edited out, include a note to that effect in the email when you send the picture and every effort will be made to accommodate your wishes.

For these reasons, do not compose your picture with any important elements right at any edge of the frame. Approximately one quarter inch is lost from the final picture on the top and each side in the printing process (50 pixels at the final resolution). In previous years, some good pictures could not be used because the adjustments required to fit the calendar format cut out important parts of the picture.

Submitting Pictures:

Please email picture submissions to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or you may email a link to the picture if it is stored online. However, make sure it can accessed at full resolution. Many online photo sharing sites do not keep a full resolution copy of your pictures.

Please use this gmail account because other accounts may not be checked for pictures. Gmail does not have the relatively modest file size limitations of CarNut's other email accounts so there should be no problems with sending large files or even several large files in the same email.

Photos that have been uploaded to albums in CarNut's Garage Discussion Forum or in the MINI Owner's Lounge cannot be used directly from these albums since full resolution pictures are not retained by these systems.

The 12 pictures that will appear in the calendar are determined by an open voting process in which anyone can vote whether they submitted contest entries or not.

The winners will be asked to provide a descriptive caption and photographer's name and screen name within three days after the voting has concluded. If you do not wish to provide this information or do not respond within the required time period, your photo will declared ineligible and the picture with the next highest vote tally will appear in its place.