I was asked to Judge a Photo Contest, Here’s How I Chose the Winners
This year I was asked to judge a major photo competition. It meant looking at the work of 150 photographers, and each had submitted ten pictures, so I had 1500 images to hold in my mind and evaluate. That’s a lot to keep track of, at least for me, so I used a set of guidelines to help me through the process. I thought you might like to have some insight as to what goes through a judge’s mind when they are looking at your work, so here’s a peek at what was going through mine.
Consistency — For this event, we looked at the work in two rounds. The preliminary one scored a photographers work as a body, and only the highest scoring photographers were moved into the second round. We judged each picture on a scale of one to ten, so if I gave someone one ten, three fives and six threes that would total forty-three points, while someone else with four sevens and six fours would get fifty-two. This rewards a body of work that is all headed in the same direction, made with similar intention and skills shown each time. That picture that got a ten in the first photographers’ work might be a great lucky shot that lives forever, but it doesn’t make them a great photographer all by itself. Show me you were aiming at the same bullseye for all the pictures and we can talk about how close you came to it.
