Judging: PPCO 2015 Image Competition

One of the things that I’ve discovered about judging is what an incredible honor it is to be asked to do it. I know that sounds all hoity-toity and prim and proper and what you’d expect a judge to say. Publicly, anyway. But it is the truth. You have trusted me to evaluate your prints. With my back to you, you allow me to say what I will about your images. You hope that I am kind and fair. You expect I will be professional. That’s a fair amount of responsibility to place in my hands and I’m always humbled to be asked and hope that I am able to deliver in a way that pleases us both.

It takes great courage to enter your first competition. That’s usually the hardest one. And depending on how your work was received by the judges, that will more than likely dictate whether or not you go on to compete a second time. I know this, and I try to be as careful as I can when judging your images. I want your competition experience to be a positive one. I cannot promise that I will give you the score you hoped for, but I can promise my comments and critiques of your work with be done with great care.

I recently had the pleasure of judging at a small Ohio affiliate, the Professional Photographers of Central Ohio. I was impressed at the number of entries that were in the competition and the quality of photography shown. I had heard that there were a number of first-time entrants with work in the competition and a quick survey showed that there were a number of them present to watch. This intention of this competition judging was to be educational by having comments made on each image. We had two and a half hours to judge 65 images, which was very do-able.

I was even more fortunate to be judging with my good pal Robert Kunesh. He and I co-taught a print competition class this past fall at the Professional Photographers of Ohio conference. It was scads of fun, there were a number of trophy winners in that evening’s competition from our class, and I think we all learned a lot. So, being able to judge with him was a great bonus! Robert and I have both been through the PPA Judges’ Workshop, and he has many years of experience under his belt. I, on the other hand, am rather new to the judging scene, and am still a Juror-In-Training, but I think if you average our years together, it works out.

That is how it works, right? 😉

Robert is highly creative and I am highly technical, so I think, as a team, we provided a nice balance to the judging. We wound up both commenting on almost every single image, which in the end, ran us over time, so I appreciated those who toughed it out to the end. I know staying out late on a weeknight isn’t all that preferable. (When you have two judges that are also print competition instructors – they tend to talk).

One of the lovely things about judging at a local affiliate is that they do not have to adhere to the more formal rules of state and district judgings. They may stipulate their own requirements and choose as few or as many judges as they prefer. They can also allow the atmosphere to be somewhat relaxed in that the judges may spend extra time speaking about the competition process or a photographic theory that presents itself in the course of the judging. We still judged according to the rules, but we were able to maximize the educational potential of the competition.I found great enjoyment judging under these conditions and I applaud PPCO for wanting the process to be educational.

There were many very good images that came across our screen that night. I hope that our input was valuable and I look forward to seeing a lot of those images at the Ohio/Northeast District Image Competition. I won’t go into any of the images here, since we are in the middle of competition season, but I have high hopes for many of the competitors and their images.

Look for me at the PPO Convention in March and let me know how you did. I will be more than likely found in the company of my co-judge, Bob; we’d love to know how your images did in competition and what you’re up to.