EP147 Image Competitions: The Only Way To Fail Is To Fail To Enter

Yay! Other than a crappy cold, a very good week.  Won a Gold Bar with the Guild Of Photographers a couple of days ago which got me to thinking about competitions: why we do them, how to do them and the fear of failure (when in fact, the only failure is to not enter at all!)

There are one or two other things to bear in mind and I step through them in the podcast.

Enjoy!

Cheers P.

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Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] I'm really sorry, it's just been one of those weeks. I have spent three days, three whole days at home feeling ill and mostly grumpy. Sorry, I don't take to being poorly particularly well. Whatever Michelle and Sarah had last week. Of course, I inherited it this week. It turns out that the word viral is not a joke.

[00:00:25] It's just a cold, really, but it's been quite a horrible one. It hit my chest straight away, and I just felt awful, and if I'm honest, after three days off work this evening is the first time I've really felt sort of compos mentis. I've spent three days sitting in the lounge with the fire on. It's been cozy enough, but I've, I hate being unproductive.

[00:00:46] I hate not getting through the lists that I've got to do. I hate the idea that I've wasted three days, but in the end, that had to be done. So as I sit here next to the fire watching back to back episodes of Law Order, I'm Paul, and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast.

[00:01:07]

[00:01:20] So I hope you're all feeling a little bit better than me, and in terms of the catch up of the week, well, I can't really say that I've done that much out of the seven days or so. Three of them have been spent laid up doing very little. Obviously, I'm still doing some coding, writing emails, and an awful lot of judging has been flowing through my world. Not this time, not just as a judge or as a chair of judges but also as a contestant. It's been an interesting time.

[00:01:47] So, I judged for the FEP this week, the first of the final rounds of their annual image competition. I'm one of the judges on the portrait category.

[00:01:58] 647 images, I think, were there to judge. And if you think about that as a volume of judging and all of our, all of the judges. Whether it's for the BIP that I chair for, whether it's for the SWPP, the Societies, whether it's for the Guild, whether it's for the FEP, the World Cup, it doesn't really matter what the judging is.

[00:02:19] It takes time and we do it for nothing. Well, I say nothing. We don't do it for nothing, but we do it for free. And so, if you think about all of that, 647 images. If I went at it hell for leather and judged one image per minute with no breaks, that's still basically 11 hours of judging, which is an awful lot when you think about it.

[00:02:45] And yet, we put ourselves through it. And I do it because I really enjoy it. I really love the process, I love seeing the images, though there is some disappointment when we're judging and the images haven't come up to standard. But, nonetheless, it's cathartic, it's inspiring, it's very therapeutic, it's quite a rhythmical sort of thing to do.

[00:03:04] And I really love it.

[00:03:06] On top of that, if that wasn't enough, the results to the BIPP monthlies came out the first BIPP monthly round. So this is a new competition for us. We've set it up to run parallel to the print competition, which opens up in sort of June time and it's judged in September. And they run side by side and they are different beasts.

[00:03:27] So the print competition, exactly what it says on the tin. Submit your prints in the category. Best print wins each category. That's it. Very simple to do. The monthlies are not that. The monthlies have been designed.

[00:03:41] to reward consistency as much as really high quality inspirational work. With a print competition, you only need to shoot one image, and depending on what everybody else shoots, you could end up with the title of the print image of the year, the portrait print of the year, the wedding print of the year, whatever it is.

[00:04:00] With the monthlies, it's been designed not to be quite like that. The monthlies It's about consistency more than it is about that one high scoring image. That's not to say that a high scoring image isn't a thing to be treasured and w