I am not sure where I found out about ViewBug, but it is a site that has photo contests.  You can join for free, but that limits you to 10 uploads per week.  Some of the contests are free to enter.  Others cost.  You can also have a paid membership.  With that, you can upload as many photos as you want, and you do not have to pay for any of the contests.

I was looking at their contests, and one was a free contest for landscapes.  It was sponsored by a weekly photography news web site. So, I entered two of my HDR photos. The idea is that anyone on the site can view the pictures and vote on them, and after the submission deadline, judges will decide the winner.

This is kind of like American Idol.  I could have gone on Facebook and told everyone to go to the site and vote for my picture, but then it is no longer about photographic quality, it is about how many people you can get to vote for you.

The deadline for the contest was June 1.  I was just notified that this picture was “ranked in the top 20 most voted percentile.”  I am not exactly sure what that means.  There were 8900 pictures entered in the contest.  If mine received enough votes to be in the top 20%, then it was one of the 1800 best.  So, it is kind of hard to get all that worked up, but all in all, I still think that was pretty good.