Judgement Day

It all started with a message...

I was relaxing on the sofa when I got a notification on my phone from a old college friend explaining that a judge had cancelled for a club competition for this coming Friday. Would I be interested in taking his place?

It was a bit of a strange request because although we had been friends for over 30 years, out recent contacts had been few and far between (ironically the last time we had met was at a Charlie Waite talk). I was vaguely aware he was into photography and a member of a club, however I wasn't aware he knew the same of me, and certainly we had never done any photography together or had he seen any of my work.

In short I was surprised that he knew enough of my work and background to even consider me. Was he really that desperate?  Added to that he had no idea whether I had the skill, knowledge and experience to be a judge.

As for myself, I had to ask myself whether I wanted to do it? At the end of the day everyone is a judge in some way as we form opinions on someone else's work. However saying whether you like a photo is one thing. A judge has to more than a blind critic, but also needs to communicate a reason for their decision. The best judges are also teachers and mentors, offering practical advice on how the photographer can improve. Did I have the skills to do that?

Also being a judge you have to fairly self-confident and thick skinned. In the past on this very blog, I have heavily criticized judges. (evidence for the prosecution here, here and here). Did I want to put myself in that same position? It is one thing to pass opinions between friend and family, but did I want to do it in front of a group of photography enthusiasts

On the other hand, I am a strong believer in that you should only criticise if you are prepared to try and do better. Also I would be paid to go and view a set of photos, which sounded like a good gig. Also I felt that as an avid scholar of the art and history of photography I had enough in my locker to give something back. 

In truth I only spent a couple of minutes deliberating before replying back that I would do it.

The Learned Judge

 I had only 4 days to before the event, so I thought it would be a good idea to

a) get some practice in
b) maybe actually learn a bit about judging.

Practice was pretty easy. There are loads of photo-sharing sites almost begging you to critic them. Rather than make snap judgements, I deliberately slowed down and created a monologue in my head about my thoughts about the image. I found it was often to easier to find faults in an image, than positives. Poor cropping, artifacts, shadows and blown highlights were often in evidence, and it was easy to see where an image could be improved. However I didn't want to be the kind of judge who only picked out faults, so I tried to find  positive things to say. This was not always easy and I hoped the standard on the day would be higher.

It also forced me to think about my judging philosophy.  One of my criticisms about judges in the past is that they often concentrate on the minutiae and rarely on the image itself. My local association guidelines indicate that 50% of the weighting should be based on the image story, or how well the subject expressed itself to the viewer, but in the past I have found this is rarely the case and most marks are lost by artifacts the judge found distracting. I was determined not to be like that and judge based on the artistic as well as the technical merits.

On my locally association webpage I found some useful advice and information on judging. This one on the PAGB site was especially interesting. The advice was actually pretty good, but at the end of the day you are using your own values to judge and therefore I was determined that I stay true to myself

1) Be positive as well as critical
2) Don't be afraid to indicate personal preferences and biases. After all I am not a robot
3) Judge on the impact as well as the technical aspects

The competition

I must admit I had been expecting and gearing up to a pretty standard competition. 2 sets of images and prints, marked out of 20, with some held back and an overall winner.

However I was informed the day before that the competition was something called "Mix and match" which was a new one on me. However some questioning of some elder members of my club indicated that it was something that used to be more common in the days of slide projectors.

The rules were as follows (read carefully, there maybe questions)

1. Club A chooses an image. For this they get 5 points
2. I judge the image out of 5 for quality
3. Club B chooses an image that has to in some way match Club A image. The criteria for the  matching is up to Club B. It could be a myriad of attributes such as colour, shape, subject or something totally different. The important thing is to pick an attribute that is obvious to me as a judge.
4. I judge that image for quality out of 5, then I can an additional mark from 1 to 5 for how well that image matches Club A image.

After 3 images, the clubs switch around in terms of lead.

It sounds very subjective, and it is, but so is all judging. However unlike normally judging which is done in silence, audience participation is actively encouraged both in comments on quality and the reasoning behind the match.

There are a few other things that stood out from that. Firstly quality is only 5 marks. This got me out of a bind, since I have never understood why although club photos are in theory marked between 1 and 20, the lowest mark I have ever seen is 13. What are the other 12 marks for? I have been tempted over the years to see how bad an image has to be to break the 13 barrier. However in a competition, would I be brave enough as a judge to use the full mark range? Fortunately I did not need to find out. 5 marks gave me plenty of latitude to use the full mark set

Secondly, how do you measure matching quality? There is no advice for that, so i had to go with my gut instinct.

Judgement Day

So how did it go?  Well firstly, I quite enjoyed the interaction element, and while sometimes I had to fight against undue influence from the audience, it did make me feel that all competitions should encourage such feedback.

Judging the quality of the image was not that hard, and I felt I gave some reasonable feedback. Assessing the quality of the match was more subjective and difficult. However I felt I joined in the spirit of the game and no one seem to complain to much or accuse me as unqualified to judge.

So would I do it again? It is probably a big step up from this to say a inter-club competition where  the stakes are higher and therefore the demands on the judging more. However I think it is something I would still consider doing in the future

But don't judge me on that.....

Judge and Jury for the day

Anyone who has ever had their photograph judged will know the feeling. of your eyes slowly rotating into your eye sockets as the judge chooses another photo with seemingly little artistic merit, while overlooking your photographic masterpiece. In the inevitable post-mortem at the pub later, the losers discuss the judges obvious lack of understanding of basic photography (while the winner obviously tries to make a case for the opposite)

Well, on Monday I had the opportunity to be a judge for a day as my prize for winning the previous weeks #Sharemondays competition.

So how did it go?

Firstly, I had not exactly been looking forward to it. It meant that a lot of strangers were relying on me to carry on the mantle of the competition. What if I made a cock up of it ? Would it mean I would be for ever castigated by other twitter photographers as the person who killed #Sharemondays?

On the Monday, I started watching as the entries rolled in. It is here that I hit my first issue. Twitter is in many ways a great platform, but for a application which is used by millions world wide it has its quirks.

One of these is its search capabilities.

I had assumed it would be quite easy to filteron the required hashtag within a certain date range, but when I went through advanced search and set the search criteria as the required hashtag and the date range as the day before Monday and the Monday of the competition, I got absolutely nothing. My response was "you have to be fecking kidding me"

It took me a while to find out it only seemed to work if the end date was missed off. Once that was worked out I could see the entries for that Monday. On Tuesday I made the conscious decision to stay off social media for the rest of the day. When i got home, I did the search again, and created a  twitter moments of all the entries.

Twitter moments is a nice way of creating a collection of tweets together. It also allows you to filter those tweets that have either been incorrectly tagged with #sharemondays or have attempted to hijack the feed.

I however quickly hit an issue. In moments, like the main twitter, you can filter the tweets  using a search criteria such as tag and date range. I used the same one I was using on the main twitter feed and it came up with a selection of images. Good I thought, this will easy. It was only when i started going through them I noticed some images from the main feed were missing. It was clear that the two search strings gave a different selection of images.

"You have to be double fecking kidding me" I thought.

I therefore I had to manually go through the twitter feed adding in entries the moments search had missed. Still by 6 O'Clock I had what I thought was the complete list and published the moment and went for dinner.

Except I hadn't.

Two people contacted me to say their's were missing and they were right. For reasons only known to Twitter, some images, although tagged correctly, did not show up. It makes you wonder how many entries from the other twitter competition feeds never get seen for the same reasons. Still to this day I cannot guarantee that I got them all. All I can say is that I tried my best. I did however have a dream a few days later in which total strangers accosted me in the street complaining I would not look at their photos.

Armed with the most complete list I could compile, I went about judging them.

I had thought quite a bit in the previous week about how to judge the images. Judging them on a purely technical level seemed pointless. The photographers would range from ability to beginner to pro. For some it would be like assessing a Picasso by looking at the brush strokes.  Anyway one of my bugbears with competition judges is their tendency to concentrate on the minutiae imperfections , but not the image as a whole, something I was determined not to do.

Instead I decided to use two criteria. Firstly did the image resonate with me? The image needed to to have some sort of connection at a quite instinctive level. Secondly, was it an image I wished I could of taken? I must admit that my judgement may of been colored by my own desire to push the boundaries of what I consider photography, so I was looking for the same criteria in others.

Maybe these are not the best criteria to judge photos and it would make the choice a very personal one, but it was the only way I felt I could do it.

The first task was to filter the 80 or so images down to a short list of 4. In truth I could of chosen double that number, and I tried to include a wide range of images and genre's in the final 4.

Then we had to choose the winner. In hindsight, this was easier than I made out, since the eventually winner had stood out from virtually the 1st time I saw it. However I had to go through the process to ensure that I was choosing the right image for the right reasons.

So did the correct the image win?

Well in one way yes, since it was only my decision to give and therefore it does not matter if people agree or disagree with it. Of course, one of the problems basing the decision on a instinctive like or dislike, is that another image may of made it on another day. In other words, at the end of the day judging will always be subjective and while its nice to win, not being chosen does not in anyway de-value your work. Its just one person out of 6 billion opinion.

Now its over, I have to say I quite enjoyed the process. I learnt a lot about assessing other photos and a little about how the criteria I use to assess my own images. Of course the big question is, now I have been a judge for a day, will that mean I will have more sympathy for people judging my own work?

Simple answer.....Nah.




 

Why did they take that?

Last night we had our Annual inter club competition between MPS and Ashby photographic club. where we pit the 30 of the best prints and DPI's as chosen by the members in an open category.

The club membership had only deemed one of my photos worthy, which was disappointing but fair enough. However it at least it allowed me to have some cards in the game, so to speak.

The image that was selected was the one of hammer smashing a light bulb

As it was my image was one of the 1st to come up and I was eager to hear the advice that the judge had to impart...

Judge :- "This image is technically very good"

Me : - "good start" I thought

Judge :- "But I can't see why they took it"

Me :- "WTF!!!" I thought

In the end the image was awarded 14 marks which was the lowest mark the judge made all competition. What was worse was that this was the only time the judge made that comment, so either he was not being consistent in his marking, or there was something specific about my image he could not relate too.

Now normally I tell myself to let judges comments slide off me like water of a ducks back, but I must admit this one really got under my skin and I let it affect the rest of the competition and the inevitable pub post-mortem.

So much so, that I did something I rarely do in competitions and actually questioned him later about his comments.

His explanation was that he had been reading a book by Susan Sontag, the long time partner of the legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz. In this the author had said that if something does not connect to you directly then it is worthless.

To me this is a difficult concept to understand. If we consider anything we do not understand or relate to as worthless, we are setting ourselves up as the ultimate arbitrator  of worth. If we do this, we are denying the chance that someone has seen something that we have not and therefore closed our mind to the chance of learning.

For example, there were a number of images last night that I could not understand why the photographer had taken them, or what the photographer was trying to relay. But rather than closing my mind to them, it made me curious to investigate and work out  why some saw things I could not. That is the way we learn; not by pretending that all that is closed to us is worthless, but by accepting that we must always re-evaluate our opinions and prejudices

Now maybe it is a requirement for a judge to remove ambiguities from their opinion, so that they can have clarity in their judging. However to me it is disappointing that a judge cannot move beyond their personal opinion and try and put themselves  in the photographers shoes.

Again I think the most disappointing thing is that the same comment could be said of many images last night and many images generally. Personally I cannot understand why anyone would take the same image of the millennium bridge in London, which has been photographed many times or a "bird on a stick" (however competently done).  However I am willing to accept that to they have a reason for taking it.

Saying that the one thing I probably would of changed last night was the name of the photo because it perhaps would of more clearly identified my reason for taking the image. However since the judge freely admitted he took little notice of the title, it would of made little difference in the result.

The judges other comment was that he felt the image did not add anything to the genre. Well here I am guilty as charged (a little judge joke there). However in my defense, if that is the criteria we judge images, 95%  of competition images should be thrown away now.

You rarely see anything in a competition which even pushes boundaries, never mind breaks them. Be it a photo of a waterfall, a picture of a mountain, a bird on a stick, or a portrait; in almost all occasions I have seen it done before and better. However that does not in anyway devalue the image.

Also this is the nature of competitions. Photo presented have been filtered in most part via the opinions of the member. Unfortunately it is also true that most images are chosen on the basis of how well they will do in the competitions. This has a tendency to remove the outliers because they are considered to risky in such a context.

If there were genre breaking photos, they are almost certainly been removed from the pile a long time ago like a dangerous mutation is removed from the gene pool.

However I did take some things away from last night.

Firstly is a realisation that while it is important that you learn from the great masters of art, you should not follow their advice blindly. After all we have no context to understand how they came to their opinions. Instead we should only use it to test our givens in the hope that it might reveal new insights, perhaps ones which are unique to you as an individual.

Secondly, judges opinions, while valued, are just that one persons opinions. They have a more value doe to their experience, but if you let yourself  be led purely by those opinions you just become the equivalent of a fake Rolex. Good but a poor copy of the original.

So you have two choices. Follow the accepted opinion, or have the courage to follow your own path. One way is harder, but ultimately more rewarding.

I know which way I'm going...


P.S the club won the competition last night

Sometimes your the hero, sometimes the clown

Another day, another competition.

This time it was the end of year competition at Melbourne photographic society, a chance for all the members to show off their best work as the club season ends.

The last competition I had achieved a bit of a breakthrough with getting top marks from one of images. Now I wasn't totally convinced that it was that good, but it is those sort of things that you have to take into account when you are selecting your years best images.

The competition allowed 3 prints and 3 digital images from each member. The biggest challenge was therefore to select my 6 best images. The problem was my idea of what makes a good image has changed a lot over the last year. Ones I considered good, I now consider passée, while other I have looked at with new eyes and seem better

Also  my success in competitions, apart from the last one, has been under par, let us say. As a result I have not had much guidance from that avenue.

As a result the images I put in, was a combination of images that have done well in competitions (the thaw), some ones that I had been holding back from competition for just this event, and ones I thought were under marked and I wanted a 2nd opinion (with a few tweaks just to remove some previously noted flaws).

Being the end of year competition, the standard as expected was high. The judge, Hazel Manning had an interesting take on many of the images. However my prints did relatively poorly. My 20/20 from last time only got 15, despite the nice comments about it. Hey, sometimes the hero, sometimes the clown...

This goes to show two things. Firstly there is a large difference in judges opinions. They should follow the rules and be consistent, but it amazing how often they vary based on personal interest/prejudice(it was obvious early on she liked buildings, but not images of children). This also means just because a photo achieves low marks in one competition, it does not make it is necessarily a bad photo.

In the DPI's category, I had more success. Again the competition was fierce, with one image having just achieving a ribbon at the Port Talbot International Salon. However I had high hopes with my windfarm at sunset image. In the end that was given 17, (which I thought was a bit under marked, maybe not helped by the judge's stated prejudice against windfarms), but which I would of easily taken that mark a few months ago.

But that was overshadowed by this image below, which received 20 marks and only came a hairbreadth of winning the DPI overall(Yes ribbon winning entry did win and deservedly so).

Propeller Running - 20/20

The thing about this image was that I had entered it in the genre competition and it had received 15 marks. But I thought it was better than that, so I put it in again.

However I made two changes. Firstly I cloned out a bit of writing on the far right of the plane which was distracting(In hindsight I should of removed the yellow object too ), but more crucially I changed the title.

It was originally called "Fat Albert", which is what the plane is actually called( it is parked in East Midlands Aeropark ), but to me the story is not the plane, but the fact the logo seem to be sprinting away from the propellers. The previous judge did not see that, so to emphasize the point I renamed it "Propeller running".

This seemed to make quite a difference and this judge got it. Which just goes to show how crucial the naming of the image is in relating the story to the audience.

In conclusion, some success at last, and it leaves me with some confidence going into the new photographic year.

So what next? Well I have already some images waited to be worked on, which show some promise. However I have decided on concentrating on two things this year.

Firstly I want to improve my black and white prints. Whether I can do this with the software I have at present maybe challenging.   I noticed that many use plug-ins like silver efex, but that would require using something like lightroom, which I have resisted up to now.

Secondly I am going to try and concentrate on the story rather than the photo. I have come to believe that taking a nice image is all well and good, but without the photo telling a good narrative it is just that, a nice photo.

I want my images to be more than that, so that is this years challenge. Wish me luck...