Every year, we challenge ourselves and enter some of our best images from that year in to the AIPP Queensland Professional Photography Awards. Last year was pretty awesome, and this year was similarly excellent, for different reasons 🙂
Lots of Firsts this year:
First time entering twelve images. You can enter up to twelve images in the awards, and up to four in each category. I went crazy in four categories – Illustrative (which was very successful last year), Landscape, and Travel. Eight of the twelve images made it over the line in to award territory, which is pretty excellent, including all four of my Illustrative images.
First time matting my own images. Photographs submitted for judging follow a pretty strict convention regarding size and matting. In the past, we’ve paid others to mat award images. This year, I thought… “I know! Mat all of them myself! Think of the money I will save!” I actually do think that it’s cost effective to mat your own entries… if you get them right each time. “Hi, I’d like to buy some more mat board please.” Say that enough times, and you’ll find when you add up the cost, the time, and the heartache… Moral of the story, go with a professional. We engage some of the best professionals around to produce the finished product for our customers, and it might have been wise to do the same thing for ourselves 😀
Then there’s the biggie…
First time judging. After the awards last year, I mentioned to one of the organisers that it would be great to get my feet on the path towards judging one day. The AIPP is committed to growing and deepening its pool of judges for state and national awards, and they invited a group of about seven of us to take part in judge training, and potentially judge for the first time at the 2016 awards. The training was excellent and challenging and eye-opening from start to finish. When you have experienced judges of the calibre of some of our state judges, with their… their… WORDS, and their… their… THOUGHTFULLY COMPOSED SENTENCES, it’s pretty daunting to be up there with them critiquing images. You couldn’t ask for a better group of people to learn from. Over the course of a few months, I learned a lot about how to see and read images, how to score and calibrate based on professional practice and awards standards, how to construct a concise, meaningful critique and deliver it effectively.
The actual judging experience over the two days was intense; they generally had zero or one newbie judge on any panel of five, so as a judging panel there was plenty of support for the new people. I’m pretty pleased to say that I think I did all right judging. I came to learn that the diversity in the group of judges is one of its biggest strengths; as a panel, we all had different experiences and saw things differently, while we all shared common experiences delivering images and communicating visually – that diversity resulted in excellent discussion and, at the end of the day, great scores for images.
I don’t think I said anything stupid while on the panel (livestreamed to the internet, to be watched and re-watched for all eternity). I stuck my neck out once or twice for a print where I felt quite strongly about the score, and generally found I was able to articulate my feelings in a convincing way. Which led to a few other firsts, like… first time entering a score in the gold range, immediately followed by my first challenge, which became my first successful challenge helping the image up to a score in the gold range.
Now… my own images? My category of choice is the Illustrative category, and I’m very proud to be one of the three finalists in that category for this year, along with Charmaine Heyer, and the winner, the extremely talented and most excellent Foroogh Yavari. Same three finalists as last year, so that’s consistency 🙂 All four of my Illustrative images made it over the line, with one of them going up to Gold after an impassioned argument from one of the judges. I’m going to keep most of my images under wraps until the national awards later this year, but one image that I’ll share is this one of my mum Sylvia. I love this portrait of her, photographed in her rather luxurious walk-in closet at home. I had the easy part – Wanda arranged shoes and shelves, and spent the shoot smushed up in the corner of the room holding a gigantic octagonal softbox. 🙂
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