A Scenic World

There’s a monthly contest on one of the photography forums I frequent. Usually there’s an overall theme, like “Textures and Lines” or “Emotions,” but this month, they’ve raised the ante: the subject is “Your Best Shot.” I’m sure I’m not the only one pouring over my archive, trying to find the elusive mixture of composition and light and color and timing and luck that makes just one of my photos be considered The Best.

But I don’t think it’s as simple as finding that one shot that I consider to stand out. I’m too close to the subject. I know which photos I had to bleed to get. I know which ones took hours of waiting for exactly the right conditions. I know which ones I got through dumb luck. I even know which ones looked lackluster and dull before I added tons of post-processing.

Which brings me to a critical point: this is a contest to be voted on by fellow participants. Every time you post a photo or hang a print, if you want people to like it, you have to consider your audience. If I canvassed my friends for which shot of mine they thought was best, I’d get one bright floral shot from one friend, one moody travel shot from another, one cute puppy shot from the one who loves dogs, and one self-portrait (I’m guessing that’s what my boyfriend would choose, anyway). So ideally, you’d pick the shot that has the most universal appeal, even if it’s not technically the best by any other measure.

So what do other photographers look for when they judge other photographer’s work? I’ve been looking rather closely at the voting patterns in another forum’s challenges and have reached a few conclusions (that might be entirely wrong). First, I think there’s a large minority who are completely opposed to post-processing of any kind, regardless of whether the rules of the challenge allow post-processing or not. When these people vote on an image, it automatically gets low marks regardless of any other merits of the photograph. I’ve wondered just how many are really purists who think that any image manipulation is verboten (lest the photo become “a photo illustration” rather than a “photograph”) and which ones just don’t understand or can’t do their own post-processing and thus view good post-processing as an unfair advantage.

Second, a whiff of the exotic (and coupled with that, a good dose of poverty) can bolster a photo’s standings, depending on the locale of the voters. Most of us have grown up having images from National Geographic and Pulitzer prize winners held up as prime examples of what a great photograph is. Many of these photos bring pressing issues around the world – issues that most of us would never see or know about or think about – to life before our eyes. I don’t mean to denigrate the real effect that these photos have had, but I think at some point, perhaps subconsciously, when we see a photo of a poor Mongolian farmer or a dirty, unkempt Indian street urchin, we automatically assign it a higher marking, regardless of any other merits of the photograph.

This is related a bit to my third point. I think there’s a tendency to reward higher marks to photos that we don’t possess the technical know-how to do ourselves. I’ve found that occasionally people who have never tried macro or who don’t have the equipment to easily shoot macro tend to be more impressed by a so-so macro shot (I’m talking about my own shots here) than people who know what goes into making a good macro. But this is a bit of a double-edged sword; macro especially has a lot of good practitioners, so most people have been exposed to fantastic shots. Some of them become inured to these shots and consider even the most technical, most beautiful, most impossible-to-get-but-gotten-away shot to be pedestrian. The same goes for landscapes (how many gorgeous shots of Yosemite have you seen?), portraits, architecture…it’s so easy to pass over a shot that looks to be too perfect.

So what to pick? What to choose? In the next post, I’ll be looking at the tools I already have at my disposal to see what the masses might be thinking.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 10:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.