Open Letter to Photography Judges

Judges, what's the deal with bird photos? Are they automatically better than landscapes, or portraits, or street photography? At The Garden Photographic Society we joke about "The 3-Fs: Fur, Feathers and Flowers", and how they get all the high scores! Really, it's more Fur and Feathers that automatically get 2 more points than flower images! I guess "3 Fs" sounds better than "2 Fs"!

For those of you who have never competed in a photo club photography competition, each image is scored between 6 and 9. There are 3 judges so a great score is 24, three eights, the most you can get is a 27, three nines. I think I saw a 26 once, but 24-25 is often the top score.

The competitions where the judges are "nature club" members, or just inclined by experience to give a 3-Fs shot 2 more points than other photos, are boring competitions, because they're predictable! In order to combat this predictability, when I became Garden Photographic Society President I instituted separating the color category into "Pictorial Nature" (not the "pure" nature of Nature clubs, where most editing isn't allowed), and "Open Color", everything else, landscapes, portrait, sports, street, politics, etc., to separate "Nature" from "Other", so Other has a chance.

Check out my manifesto on the subject, The Photo Club Revolution on this blog:

https://www.carloscardonaphotography.com/2021/02/the-photo-club-revolution.html

I recently spoke to the Chicago Area Camera Clubs (CACCA) about our category changes, which have also been adopted by 2 other local clubs. Has this fixed the problem? Not really. Yes, nature shots now only compete against other nature shots, but when we are in the Open Color category, and the judges see, for example, an abstract photo they often are flummoxed about how to judge it. "I don't know how to judge that" has been said more than once.

We need more open-minded judges, who understand that their own particular tastes in photography is NOT what they are here to judge! I wonder how many judges have realized this, and how many just go "well, I don't like really color-saturated photos", and give that a low score. It's not about what you like, it's "How well did the photographer achieve what THEY were trying to do". If it's, say, very saturated, did the saturation add to the meaning or story of the photo, or detract? Does it work better saturated? The photographer is obviously NOT trying to  make a realistic depiction there, so it should not be judged as "it doesn't look like that in real life". It's an artistic depiction, a landscape on Mars? Or an outer photo of an inner landscape? It's art, start by going with it, and then judging it ON IT'S OWN TERMS!

A lot of judges have learned specific biases in looking at images, and they've lost their "Beginner's Mind" (and suffer from "Experts Mind"), as explained in "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki. It's on Apple and Google Books.

So let's make better judges: start by pretending this is the first photograph you've ever seen! Do NOT reference your own work as an overlay on this image, look with fresh eyes instead of "my taste in photography is" eyes. How does the image make you feel? Look at the title: is it descriptive of the image, or a counterpoint or joke to make you think differently? I named one of my flower shots "Flower Politics", to make the judges think about how flower photos are usually judged, and judge it with fresh eyes.

Again, did the photographer achieve the art that THEY were trying to make, or not? How could they have improved it? During the feedback session ALWAYS begin with what you liked, and then how to improve what you didn't.

While we're on flower politics, one of our best Garden Photographic Society photographers Anne Belmont (her huge flower prints used to grace the Orchid Show entrance) stopped competing because judges didn't get what was awesome about her "Creative Blur" Lensbaby flower shots! She got tired of losing to shots that were edge-to-edge sharp (which is not the way our vision works, so that's not "what you saw"). The way our vision works is focused in the center and blurry on the outsides, like a Lensbaby shot!

When I started competing I thought that seeing the photos was great, but the competitions quickly became boring and predictable. Accepting someone else's opinion of your art is a dicey proposition, and you should go into it with an "I'm here to improve my photography, and listen with an open mind to feedback, but I don't really give a damn whether I score well" attitude. ("Don't be overjoyed by praise or cast down by blame", the Guru says). Judges' opinions are sometimes enlightening and sometimes not! And certainly don't change what and how you like to shoot just to score better. There's no money involved, right, so who cares? It's just ego-stroking, and my ego doesn't need it.

Thanks to Keith French who pointed out to me at a CACCA meeting that people were leaving photo clubs because of "hurt feelings" when their creative photos got terrible scores, while a shot with NO artistic risk, say an edge-to-edge sharp shot of an eagle, got a 26! It's a pretty photo, but you've seen it a million times! Aren't you bored already! Let's stop just doing "pretty" and start also doing "experimental", "creative", "abstract", "political", "comic", and "socially conscious" photography! Then you'll have something!