Aberdeenshire farm and rainbow - re-post for reasons given below - not quite sure of the mapping
You pays your money and you makes your choice (we’re photographers, so we make, not take) – and that just about sums up competition entries.
For the second time (out of the six I’ve entered), I’ve failed to get anything past the first round of judging of the annual (UK) Landscape Photographer of the Year (LPOTY). So, did I make a poor choice, was I unlucky, or are none of my images good enough?
There’s a letter of mine published in the August (you know, the one that comes out at the end of June) edition of the excellent Outdoor Photography magazine in which I make the case for photographing to please yourself, not others – and since I try, whenever practicable, not to be a hypocrite, that’s what I do in my own photography.
Now, it stands to reason that if you have that attitude when making photographs, you should have it when selecting them for a competition entry also. Of course you have to stick to the rules and competition subject matter – although failure to do so is no guarantee of not winning – but within those constraints, I’ve decided, basically, to hell with it! I’ll take the pictures I like, and select the ones that I would be proud to see on a page with my name under them. This applies generally, but is especially true of photography competitions. And note, LPOTY IS a photography competition, not a landscape competition, and so the prizes ought to be awarded for the added value the photographer has brought to the image, not for how intrinsically pretty the view is. I also happen to believe that any processing should be done solely in an attempt to convey to the viewer the photographer’s experience of being there, not simply to add ‘impact’ (a shitty magazine word that makes me want to add impact to the people who use it). But that’s a whole other story.
So, I won’t pretend that I’m not disappointed – it’s hard not to be when you’ve spent hours selecting and polishing your work for it to be given the two-week brush-off. But I think I’d been an awful lot more disappointed if I’d been trying to please the competition judges and still failed.
Come to think of it, money is always nice – and ten thousand pounds is very nice – but I reckon, long term, my integrity is worth more than that. [NB – I’m categorically not saying that to win you have to sell out, merely that you should never sell out to win – and this is about my journey, not anybody else’s!]
My first reaction might have been (by which I mean ‘was’) that there’s no point in entering next year – they are obviously not looking for the sort of work I like to produce – but I probably will: after all, the entry fee isn’t a lot to pay for a bit of fun and motivation. But what I won’t ever do again is rest any hopes on the outcome – if I’m making and selecting images to please myself, not the judges, then it stands to reason that I won’t necessarily please the judges; but I will know that my photography will go on exploring and growing, and never get stuck in a rut carved out by the tyres of somebody else’s vehicle, and that’s the biggest prize of all.
I’ve created an album of the shots that I entered (not all there yet, as some not on Flickr as entered. Where the re-edit is noticeably better than the original posting, as here, I’ll re-post. Any comments of this, or the album (LPOTY 2014 entry), naturally welcome.
Aberdeenshire farm and rainbow - re-post for reasons given below - not quite sure of the mapping
You pays your money and you makes your choice (we’re photographers, so we make, not take) – and that just about sums up competition entries.
For the second time (out of the six I’ve entered), I’ve failed to get anything past the first round of judging of the annual (UK) Landscape Photographer of the Year (LPOTY). So, did I make a poor choice, was I unlucky, or are none of my images good enough?
There’s a letter of mine published in the August (you know, the one that comes out at the end of June) edition of the excellent Outdoor Photography magazine in which I make the case for photographing to please yourself, not others – and since I try, whenever practicable, not to be a hypocrite, that’s what I do in my own photography.
Now, it stands to reason that if you have that attitude when making photographs, you should have it when selecting them for a competition entry also. Of course you have to stick to the rules and competition subject matter – although failure to do so is no guarantee of not winning – but within those constraints, I’ve decided, basically, to hell with it! I’ll take the pictures I like, and select the ones that I would be proud to see on a page with my name under them. This applies generally, but is especially true of photography competitions. And note, LPOTY IS a photography competition, not a landscape competition, and so the prizes ought to be awarded for the added value the photographer has brought to the image, not for how intrinsically pretty the view is. I also happen to believe that any processing should be done solely in an attempt to convey to the viewer the photographer’s experience of being there, not simply to add ‘impact’ (a shitty magazine word that makes me want to add impact to the people who use it). But that’s a whole other story.
So, I won’t pretend that I’m not disappointed – it’s hard not to be when you’ve spent hours selecting and polishing your work for it to be given the two-week brush-off. But I think I’d been an awful lot more disappointed if I’d been trying to please the competition judges and still failed.
Come to think of it, money is always nice – and ten thousand pounds is very nice – but I reckon, long term, my integrity is worth more than that. [NB – I’m categorically not saying that to win you have to sell out, merely that you should never sell out to win – and this is about my journey, not anybody else’s!]
My first reaction might have been (by which I mean ‘was’) that there’s no point in entering next year – they are obviously not looking for the sort of work I like to produce – but I probably will: after all, the entry fee isn’t a lot to pay for a bit of fun and motivation. But what I won’t ever do again is rest any hopes on the outcome – if I’m making and selecting images to please myself, not the judges, then it stands to reason that I won’t necessarily please the judges; but I will know that my photography will go on exploring and growing, and never get stuck in a rut carved out by the tyres of somebody else’s vehicle, and that’s the biggest prize of all.
I’ve created an album of the shots that I entered (not all there yet, as some not on Flickr as entered. Where the re-edit is noticeably better than the original posting, as here, I’ll re-post. Any comments of this, or the album (LPOTY 2014 entry), naturally welcome.