So if I decide to enter a contest, how do I know which image has the best chances of being successful?
Like it or not, you need to take a step back and look at your picture through someone else’s eyes. Just because you think it’s good and represents “the moment” or “the feeling” that was there when you took the photo, it doesn’t mean it’s award-winning material. Here are some great tips for you to help you decide.
It’s a major accomplishment to win a ribbon at a photo contest, and it can be a milestone on your path to photographic excellence. But every path has to have a beginning, and I’m going to help your find yours.
Separation
First of all, you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. We all have our favorite photos stashed away in the far corners of our quickly growing collection of hard drives. It’s time to get them out, dust them off and take a good, long, hard look at each and every one of them. And you’re going to have to ask yourself some pretty tough questions as you review your portfolio of favorites.
As you look at your photos, put yourself into the position of a contest judge. A judge is looking at a lot of photographs, not just yours. Over their collective lifetimes photography judges have looked at more photos than they can possibly remember, and one more shot of a sunset at the beach isn’t going to make them stand up and shout. So the first question you have to ask yourself is “Does your photo stand out?” The photographs that have the best chance of catching the judge’s eye combine impact, technical excellence and creativity.
Impact
If your photograph has impact, it will immediately generate an emotional response in the viewer. They might feel happy or sad. They might have an overwhelming feeling of wonder. They might even feel a little bit jealous that they didn’t take the picture themselves. It doesn’t really matter what they feel, as long as they feel something. If they walk away without some emotion response to your photo, they won’t remember it and they won’t come back to it.
Technical Excellence
Technical flaws will put you out of the competition. It’s as simple as that. Just imagine you’re on a cooking show and you’ve burnt the bacon. You might be the most creative chef in the world – but burnt bacon is burnt bacon. You just can’t get past it. If you have an element in your photo that’s supposed to be sharp, it had better be sharp. Your exposure needs to be spot on. You should have seamless retouching, and your printing, matting and framing need to look professional as well.
Creative
Impact and technical excellence are pretty easy qualities to define, and they’re even easier to see in real life. Creativity though, isn’t nearly as easy to qualify. And then there is creativity’s big Catch 22. To be creative, you need to be somewhat different from the norm, but if you go too far, your creativity might cross the line and become incomprehensible to the average viewer? Too little creativity and you’re no different than anyone else. Too much, and your work is misunderstood. It’s a tough call, but my personal opinion is to “Aim for the Fences”. If you are passionate about your work, then you owe it to yourself to present it with pride. And if you don’t win the contest, you are at least exposing your audience to your individual style.
But let’s say you do really want to win a photo contest. What can you do to put the odds in your favor?
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Rules
First of all, read the rules. You don’t want to lose a competition simply by making a silly mistake, like not taping the ends of your hanging wire. Read each and every rule and if it’s not clear, fire off an email to the contest manager for clarification.
Research
Do some research. Most contests post their winning entries and if you do a search, you can usually find the winners of past years. Now, just like with the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Sometimes contests get new judges, or they keep the same judges but their tastes and interests have changed. Or you might get the judge who is on a diet and now only likes photographers of food. But, at least you’ll have an idea of the types of photographs they have liked in the past. It’s better than nothing. If you check the winners for several years and you don’t see a single photograph of a flower, that’s got to tell you something.
You can also research the judges themselves. Chances are they have a website that showcases their own photography. Now I’m sure judges consider themselves impartial to style, but I’d bet that impartiality can be stretched a bit if they see a photograph that reminds them of their own work. I wouldn’t go out of my way to create a piece just to mimic a judge’s style, but it could be the deciding factor if I was choosing between a couple of images I already decided were good enough to enter.
Source: Improve Photography
