2018 Australian Professional Photography Awards

2018 marks the sixth year of entering the AIPP Australian Professional Photography Awards. Last year was pretty spesh and a hard one to beat! I’m proud of not just my achievements, but the achievements of a bunch of very very clever and talented friends that created amazing work, had the guts to enter it, and sometimes got it over the line (sometimes with massive accolades)!

Massive congrats to everyone that entered, and especially to the category winners and overall winner! Check out their work. These are the best of the best.

This year I had four prints in the Illustrative category, all refinements of the prints from the Queensland awards earlier in the year. And by “refinements”, in one case, I mean a complete reshoot from scratch. Did that pay off? Forge ahead, dear reader, to find out.

As well as all the usual excitement about creating and judging award prints, this year another photographer Melissa Neumann and I tried something a bit of fun. As a photographer entering the awards, one of the most frustrating scores to walk away with is a 79. It is just one point shy of a silver award, and (at a national level) it means it scored a 79 on the first time through, then with a second panel of review judges it stayed on 79 rather than tipping up to 80. So it’s a bit of a bummer to score a 79… and we wanted to have some fun and some community-building with that! We created The 79 Club (lifting an idea from Melissa Ghionis and the WPPI) – if your print scored and stayed on 79, and you came to see Mel or I, we’d furnish you with your very own 79 Club badge. Part of this was so you could see and commiserate with fellow 79ers at the bar (“You too?” “Yep” “Cheers”)… also so you could see that even rock star photographers fall in to that club! Pleased to see that people were excited to get badges, and sometimes a little disappointed to get an 80 and miss out. 😀

I’m pleased that all four prints of mine got over the line this year. The Checkout snuck over with an 80, The Feed went up to 80 on review (nearly got a badge!!), Grownup Machine earned an 82. My favourite print this year, the one that I poured a lot of time in to, The Muse, did spectacularly well – on a challenge, it went up to 95 – a Gold Distinction, the highest score I’ve ever received for a print, and the highest scoring Illustrative image of APPA 2018!

It’s always excellent to see and reconnect with friends at the APPAs too, including sharing a house with funsters and eating and drinking and playing games and talking until all hours like a bunch of uni students. Always a shame to have to come home and back to reality afterwards 🙂

GIANT THANK YOU PARAGRAPH: Thank you first to my family especially my gorgeous wife Wanda; they support my crazy projects and they are the best! To everyone that contributed to these, as a subject, an idea-generator, an artist, or a critiquer – thank you! I have the best bunch of finicky critiquers you could find. Thanks to Shane McCaffery for teaching me printing so I could print my own images this year. Eizo has been a big supporter this year, and I am 100% sure I wouldn’t have had this success without an Eizo monitor on my desktop. Two thumbs up to Epson and Canson for the machine and the media to make these prints sing.

OK, enough yapping. Here are some photos.