Sometimes I feel like Homer Simpson.
Not just because I could stand to lose a few pounds, enjoy bacon and drink beer, but because I sometimes do silly things. Not intentionally. They just creep up on me in moments of mental fog.
Take this year’s entry for the Professional Photographer of the Year Awards here in Ireland. A lot of time and effort goes into qualifying photographs, from which a final panel of four pictures is chosen and entered into a particular category. It’s a process that takes six months. So you’d have to be some kind of numnutz to put in all the hard graft only to slip up on a basic mistake at the end. You’d have to be a real Homer.
That would be me.
Having pulled together a strong panel of commercial photographs, one I thought might just catch the judges’ eyes this year because it hung together so well, I discovered that one of the pictures had a big flaw. A super-sized honker of a fault, big enough for me to decide it would ruin the chances of the entire panel.
So what happened? How did a sub-standard image get entered into the preliminary qualifying judgings in the first place?
Long story short – the IPPA uses an online submission system (which, by the way, is terrific) and I uploaded the wrong version of the image. I should have realized sooner – like when the photograph received a much lower score than I anticipated during the judging. At the time, I put the score down to a lapse of sanity among the judges – something regularly commented upon by photographers. Now I can see they were right and my sloppiness has come home to roost.
Doh!
The final national judging doesn’t allow any room for error. When we get to this stage of the awards process, the stakes are high and only the best work will do. A minor imperfection in a photograph (or indeed a whopper) can undermine the chances of an entire panel, regardless of how good the other three are. So out went the commercial panel and a valuable lesson learned. Entering awards is an exacting process better undertaken by Lisa than Homer.
I’ll still go for the single image award in the commercial category, but that doesn’t have the same cachet. Portfolios is where it is at.
Mercifully, I didn’t have all my eggs in one basket. In fact, out of the three panels I intended to enter, the commercial one was the weakest. I also have panels lined up for the the pictorial/travel and the reportage wedding categories. The latter is by far my strongest suit. The problem here was reducing a dozen very strong photographs down to a quartet. Artistically, I’ve had a great year, producing my best work yet. Anne and I spent a good bit of time this afternoon discussing various picture combinations for the final panel. We’ll know in February, when the winners are announced, whether we chose the right one.
A grab shot of the layouts we came up with for the 2010 IPPA/RSA Photographer of the Year Awards this afternoon. Only later in the day did I discover the flawed photograph in the Advertising/Commercial panel (c) Roger Overall 2009
