You Be the Judge

You Be the Judge

NEPG 2020

1. From the moment you conceive a photo, even a quick snap, you make numerous decisions which affect the result; things like:
2. Which lens
3. DOF
4. Position/perspective
5. Exposure
6. Composition, especially framing
7. Time of day/position of lighting
8. Background
9. Editing
10. Each of your many choices is informed by your artistic sensibility – what looks right or effective to you.
11. Your photo might not be liked by a judge because the judge doesn’t share your sensibility and would have made different choices.

Also, you may simply not have made some choices (eg lighting, background, POV) when you would have been more successful by not accepting the default conditions.

4. Your choices are likely to be more considered, focussed and successful if you educate yourself by looking at and thinking about others’ pictures, even bad ones.

When you examine other people’s pictures, you’re acting as a judge, even if you’re not choosing winners.

5. All photographers are influenced by pictures they see, especially if they stop to analyse them, or hear someone else analyse them.
6. Competition nights are all about this process: good judging is not really about choosing winners but about educating everyone in the room. (Bad judging is only about choosing winners).
7. To be successful, each of us has to be a good judge, so that each of those many decisions that go into each shot, is made intelligently, with the benefit of an experienced mind, stocked with a library of ideas. Great photos are conceived not fabricated.
8. So, while you may dismiss the idea of being a photo judge, the only difference between you and a trained visiting judge, is that you judge quietly to yourself and not to a room full of people.
9. The reality is that we’re all judges, and the better we do it, the more successful our shots are likely to be.
10. Of course, your judgment can be clouded by your participation in the creation of the image. That bias dissipates with time, which is why it’s a good practice to put your images away after you’ve edited them and assess them more objectively a few weeks or even months, later. It’s interesting to review pics you took years ago. You might say: “Wow, that was bloody good wasn’t it?” or more likely: “What was I thinking?”

Chances are, that’s how a visiting club judge will see them too.

11. Having said that, you can’t count on any judge to assess your image the way you (or other judges) think it should be assessed. For example, when I showed the image called “Dale & Marg Go for a Ride” at the club, it was given a gold by a visiting pro portrait photographer, and (with a texture) it was judged the best entry at the Perth National. At the club’s end of year show, the highly experienced judge didn’t even give it a merit. We probably all have similar stories.
12. Colin White has statistics showing that in some large competitions judged by a panel, the winning shot may not have been picked as the winner by any of the judges.
13. So, don’t expect consistency, despite WAPJA’s best efforts.
14. Don’t be too crushed by failure and don’t get too excited about success! The objective is to get into the winning circle – that group of entries adjudged to be contenders for the gong.
15. The important thing in tonight’s exercise is to refine your judging so that you refine your images.
16. Without attempting to be anything like exhaustive, here are a few tips:
17. It’s not helpful to say you like or dislike a picture. Feel free to say it, but remember that it’s not constructive;
18. Don’t limit yourself to technical issues like exposure and composition. Try to understand what made the author choose that image to submit to you. Is there a message or story?
19. Think about how the author could have better conveyed the idea. For example, if the subject suited a moody feel, you might suggest that the shot should have been darker, or the cropping out of a bright sky might have avoided a distraction from the subject’s atmosphere. In other words, how could the technical aspects better serve the concept of the shot?
20. Please don’t assess images by how well they conform to a checklist of “rules” like the rule of thirds, straight horizons, more space in front of the subject than behind etc. While those things may be worthy of comment, it should be as part of the wider question of whether the image has successfully communicated its message. Judging is primarily about communication, not formula.