The primary purpose of monthly camera club competition is, in my opinion, to select (within an appropriate time constraint and using a “reasonable” set of guidelines) and rank a specified number of exemplary photographic images from those images entered. The secondary purpose is educational. The competition should be responsive to the needs of the judge (to be informative, accurate, and fair) and to the audience—participants (to receive timely, useful, valid, and fair comments about all their images) and to non-participants (to be educated about what makes worthy [and unworthy] photographic images and good photographic practices.) Consequently, the roles of a photographic competition judge are to 1) fairly analyze, evaluate, and adjudicate photographic images; 2) explain decisions to assure the audience that the image evaluation was impartial, valid, and fair; 3) educate them on appropriate photographic practices and visual design; and 4) make suggestions to some participants about how their images could have been improved. However, the skills needed by a competition judge are more like a university instructor than a district court judge. Although both need knowledge of the subject (e.g., photographic techniques, composition/visual design, and craftsmanship) and to be impartial in judging cases or grading students, the monthly competition judge also needs to be enthusiastic, sensitive to the participants’ needs, concise, and (most of all) articulate in what makes a good photographic image. (In retrospect, this is none other than a restating of Joe’s “A Good Camera Club Judge.”)

What criteria should a competition judge use? (Let me say that I don’t think there is much question that the four C’s (Craftsmanship/technical, Composition/visual design, Creativity/uniqueness, and Communication/emotional impact on viewer) are the correct set of guidelines a judge should use.

When I look at the do’s and don’ts in Joe’s handout, I believe most of them are problems of (im)proper articulation, with the exception of the ones using inappropriate, biased factors: “I don’t like cats.” “I have seen better sunsets.”) I think the real problems are associated with the weighting and handling of these criteria. Are they gates or weights? Do you start with the technical and throw out ones that have technical flaws, then follow up with visual design problems, and then uniqueness considerations? Would you throw out an Ansel Adam’s print that had bad matting or a couple of minor dust spots in the printing? Which should be rated higher a very grabbing and novel/fresh picture with some visual design imperfections or a superb, technically crafted and composed image that has modest emotional content? (The latter might even be novel in approach.)

Part of the problem in analyzing and explaining choices is the severe time constraint. It would be ideal to have a checklist, just like a pilot going through take-off procedures, and tick off and discuss each element of each criteria for image (including how it could have been done better), then announce the in, out, or ranking decision, followed by an explicit or implicit explanation of most significant factors in arriving at that decision. Written comments to each participant would be nice too!

Some have suggested using some sort of equal (or not?) weights for the four-C’s. I believe in theory this could be an improvement, but probably impractical because of the time constraints.

I am toying with the following procedure:

1. TO START WITH, I WOULD EXPLAIN TO THE AUDIENCE HOW I AM GOING TO CONDUCT THE JUDGING AND WHAT CRITERIA I AM GOING TO USE. On the first pass I will divide the images into two piles based on whether they have HI or LOW visual impact for me.

2. On the second pass objectively/fairly, thoughtfully/respectfully, quickly/assertively, and articulately divide the HI Impact images into HI and LOW Craftsmanship (technical and visual design) and concisely explain why!

3. The HI-HI should be the bulk of the ribbon winners. [Knowing how many of these HI-HI there are should tell you how many LOW (impact)-HI (craftsmanship, from 4.) and HI (impact)-Low (craftsmanship) need to be sorted out and added to the HI-HI.]

4. The remainder of the second pass, like 2., is spent sorting the LOW (impact) into HI (craftsmanship) and the LOW-LOW group. The LOW-LOW are put aside with courtesy and dispatch. (One might spend more effort here for Novices than Advanced, time allowing. More on time-management later.)

5. Now you have to take your Quota of winners- number of HI-HI to see how many images you have to cull from the HI-LOW + LOW-HI categories. This is where it gets messy and you just have to be fair and clear why you are trading a marginally flawed Freeman Patterson for a pedestrian, but unique, superbly crafted and visually designed Bill Prosser with little emotional content.

6. Time Management:

a. For each competition category I would ask the competition person how many entries there are and compute a time allowance for that category. (It sort of looks like number of images X one minute might be a place to start. As a check, the total images judged would have to be around 100 or less; assuming a two hour time constraint. Better time limits can be developed with time and input from various clubs. These time limits should ideally consider the type of media-print or slide- and make experience-novice or advanced.)

b. The first few times doing this I would ask for some yellow and red light alerts, like Congressional hearings, but not be so dogmatic about the category limits unless it is late in the evening.

c. Time management needs to be fine tuned by each judge. Once clubs start getting reasonably good data on what time it takes to do a reasonable job then they can decide what constraints need to be imposed on total images and number of images allowed per maker.

7. Final Thoughts and Request: I hope this procedure might get away somewhat from the Demolition Derby feeling of competitions and promote a view that the glass is ? full rather than ? empty. It tries to focus on what we want not what we don’t—first things, first. It also tries to impose some time constraint discipline on the judge.