(first posted on my blog, but I thought I might share this here!!)
I’ve just come back from my local camera club (’York photographic society’) where we had an ‘exhibition’ - actually a couple of CD-roms of prizewinning entries to a couple of competitions. The first was the FIAP: ” FIAP 23rd Colour Slide Biennial 2004″. Now, Ok, this is a few years old now but I thought it might be interesting.
Wrong.
Well, kind of wrong. During a 34 minute show, with each image being on the screen for 4-5 seconds, I think that there were two photographs which I considered good. The rest were bog standard postcard images, or just plain bad (i.e. horizons which were 3 degrees out of level, verticals which weren’t etc. Y’know, basic technical stuff).
It was interesting only because of the - to my mind - staggeringly low-quality.
Then there was the something like ‘the tropical photographic competition’ - run out of Florida apparently. This time the show was 30 minutes of ‘creative photography’ from 2007.
Well.
You know when you first play with Photoshop? You load in a picture and apply the ‘watercolour’ filter? Or perhaps the ‘posterize’ filter. Perhaps you’re really avant-garde and use edge-detect. You look, and say ‘hey wow’, and then you get over it?
Apparently not. I reckon about 80% of the pictures had been posterized, or watercoloured, or had edge detection applied (or turned into an oil painting). Of those that weren’t, the rest had had a really neat ‘page turn’ effect added. Cool! Or perhaps ’selective colouring’ had been used. Woo! Way to go. For those photographers with more time on their hands, adding some motion blur to the background was the way forward.
In short, I was not impressed.
I had a discussion with another member of the club afterward and he basically said that if you enter competitions, you enter to win; and to win you submit pictures which you know the judges will like. And that means you look at what has done well in the past and recreate it.
So, it seems to be a recognized ‘prize-winning photographer’ (at least at the club level) you need to lose all shreds of creativity, and just follow the herd. There is no reward for genuine creativity!
That’s not for me. I’ll still enter the competitions, but I won’t be upset when I don’t win - who knows, maybe one day I might even get some useful feedback.
(Incidentally, this is identical to the stuff which has annoyed me about music creation over the past few years; everyone seems to think that slapping a fistful of samples together over a beat which sounds kind-of-like-something-that’s-in-the-charts constitutes writing a track. Worse still, this gets perpetuated and soon all of the creativity has been squeezed out of music. The same applies to so-called manufactured bands - a couple of safe covers, a number one single and then it’s back to the dole queue for you my lad. If it’s any consolation I now feel sufficiently fired up that I might even start doing some more music that, of course, no-one will like).
I feel that individuality is not only frowned upon, it’s actively suppressed - often, it appears, by self-censorship - until one day we’ll wake up to find that the world is uniformly bland and all of the joie de vivre will be gone.
Sorry about the rant 
ps: with regard to ‘photoshopping’. I have no problem with it per se, but it does annoy me when people print out their latest abomination and cheerfully remark that they wouldn’t be able to repeat the picture since they ‘were just messing about’. That’s not art, that’s mindless button-pushing. A monkey could do that (an infinite number of monkeys would be able to do rather better I fear)
lol that is so true. I used to be a member of a photographic club and one of the judges frowned apon small DOF, everything in the image had to be pin sharp. I don’t go to clubs now since I get more feed back from my images online, not camera club judges that have no real sense of photographic ability.
kudos for this blog
Well, I suppose I set myself up for this one..
Even though I have been singularly scathing about the level of pictures that I have seen in photographic exhibitions presented at our camera club (York Photographic Society), I must admit that I cannot level the same complaint at the club competitions themselves - the judges have not always scored the interesting photos particularly well, preferring safety over great art.
Anyway, back to the point. Last night saw the judging of the annual digital and projected images competition. I had entered five pictures - one digital, and four slides. The judge (Peter Yeo) offered extremely helpful, directed, comments, suggesting both technical and compositional tips for each and every picture shown.
In all, there were 140 entries for the digital images competition, and 40 for the slide competition. My digital entry was ‘dynamic’, but didn’t make it into a place. My slides, however, fared somewhat better - I had two ‘walkway’s and two ‘York Fog’s - one of the walkway pictures (My favourite, by the way - Manchester airport at night, fact fans) had very interesting technical comments (good control of highlights, perhaps half-a-stop extra exposure would have made it even better), but the big surprise was that my ‘York Fog 2 - Millenium Bridge’ gained second place.
Eek.
Ok, so none of the entries I made were specifically pandering to the judge; they are all pictures that I am pleased with, so that’s good. It’s just a surprise to actually get placed. One downside (Heh, there has to be one!) is that I am now not eligible for the ‘New Members Print Competition’ (which I was hoping to enter) since I have now gained a ‘first, second, or third place’.
Oh - one more thing… There’s a related competition - The John Saville Rose Bowl which is awarded for a picture depicting an aspect of the City of York.
‘York Fog 2 - Millenium Bridge’ won that.
It’s official: I am mediocre.
Blimey.