What do Print Competition Judges Want?

All hail, another article about Print Competition! Hear ye! Hear ye!

Recently, I taught a Print Competition 101 class. I was allotted 90 minutes. In reality, I spoke 120 minutes and still wasn’t done. I could have talked an extra hour. And that’s sad. It seems we’ve created a barrier to print competition with the rules. Not so much the spoken and written ones, Lord knows there are plenty of those, but with the unwritten ones. And the fact that I can find things to talk about for 3 hours regarding print competition should be a major clue that perhaps we’ve placed competition out of the reaches of the typical professional photographer.

I can talk about the 12 Elements of a Merit Print until I’m blue in the face, and sadly, there are still those folks that just don’t “get” it.

Perhaps they don’t want to get it. Perhaps the green merits from clients are quite rewarding enough. Perhaps they perceive that the judges want something different than clients. I hear this all the time. And sometimes the preliminary critiques I hear when choosing competition images is that a certain image may be great for clients, but not great for competition.

Stop. Now think about that, only backwards. Competition prints will ALWAYS be good for clients.

What it boils down to is that the judges are looking for superior images, processed and printed in a superior manner. Only top notch retouching is rewarded, only excellent posing skills past muster, and lighting…only perfect lighting achieves the highest honors.

What’s so hard about that? Those of you who complain that judges want something different than what you offer your clients might want to think about that a little bit longer. Perhaps competition has raised the bar. Perhaps your client images should be receiving the same amount of attention to detail as your competition prints.

If you never win an award or score an 80, you will still learn more in photographic competition than you ever imagined. The time and effort expended in making an image the best it can possibly be will begin to pay you back almost as soon as each lesson is learned. Gradually, you will learn how to select the best backgrounds for your clients, how to pose them in manners that are flattering to them. How to light them to minimize flaws. How to retouch them appropriately.

If all of the rules and guidelines seem overwhelming, just remember one thing, the judges want to see your best work. Enlarge it, mount it and send it in. Then sit back and watch the judging. it doesn’t do anyone any good if you get your score and don’t know why it scored like it did. Let go of the story that you know about the image and let others interpret the story as they see it. Letting other people tell you about your work is a lesson in learning.

Find someone you trust and ask them to walk you through one print competition entry. It’s not that hard. And once you do it the first time, it will get easier as you go.