--- Marilyn <marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > For those of you who have ever acted as judges for photography > shows - would you be willing to share with me (so I can share > with my class) what you look for when judging photographs, > please? > > What makes a ribbon winning photograph? > > Thank you in advance. > > Marilyn For the past several years I have been a judge for the annual Ritz "Capture Your World" photo contest. You can view last year's winners here if you are interested: <http://www.ritzcamera.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/HelpView?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=-1&bct=sPhoto+Contest%3BsPhoto+Contest%3BsDigital+Photography+Photo+Contest+2005&contentId=Photo+Contest> All judges were faculty members of the New York Institute of Photography. There are typically thousands of entries in this contest. Our approach was to do a first and sometimes second cut in order to have about 50 finalists in each of 5 categories. We would then lay each category on a large table and pick the top 10 (by first eliminating those we felt didn't belong in that group)and from those we would decide which were the Grand Prize Winner, First Place, and Honorable Mentions. All judges were working pros and senior staff but this was a contest open to amateurs only so the criteria one might use for judging images for an art gallery or for a client had to be modified somewhat. Still, we stuck to the usual - sharpness, good color, strong graphic qualities, etc. Print quality was a factor but of necessity had to be a minor one since most of the print entries were products of minilabs and at least half of the entries were jpeg's submitted on-line. Since we were individuals, each with our own sense of what makes a good photograph, there was often some good-natured disagreement. My approach to photography is essentially emotional and my approach to judging images is the same. If it grabs me, it's good. But like everyone else, I have my own set of biases. I'm not generally fond of panoramas and close-ups of flowers don't do a thing for me. I'm more of a "people" photographer. Biases like these are not a problem when there are several judges but might be if the task falls to a single individual. For that reason I think any contest or show should have a minimum of 3 judges but probably no more than 9. I don't doubt that some people would disagree with our selections. For that matter, I suspect if each of us had sole responsibility for picking the winners, we probably would have settled on more or less the same 10 in each category but the order of winners might have been different. But as they say, "the decision of the judges is final". Make sure you put that in your rules. Richard Richard Martin specializes in Cityscape and Waterscape stock photography. E-mail: marphoto@xxxxxxxxx Web: http://www.marphoto.com Web: http://www.poetographycreations.com
