Colin F
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 Re: Nature photographer of the year 2019 | |
I have grown to have a real problem with photo contests. In many (or most) smaller photo contests, it is nothing more than a way for a particular magazine or business to obtain bucket-loads of free photos that they can use for any purpose for all time, while paying nothing or almost nothing for them by acquiring the images via a “contest”. All you have to do is read the fine print of most any photo contest to see what rights you are giving away just by entering. It’s often a clever ploy to avoid paying fair market value for said images.
But for the other “big name” contests, it’s a subjective veneer of what is “best”, or a “winner”. Think about it; there are two things at play with these big “photographer of the year” photo contests:
1) The winner is picked from an enormously limited number of entries, for they are choosing only from ones submitted by individuals who have paid to enter! All of the millions of other top-shelf images that are taken every year by photographers around the world don’t get considered simply due to the fact that they weren’t entered in that particular contest.
2) What needs to be remembered too is that there is no authoritative “thing” behind any photo contest, it is merely people – people with their own particular tastes, moods and biases, and all we are submitting to when entering said contests, is the decisions of these people (with the self-appointed title of “judge”) and their partialities and preferences. Why are these individuals the ones who get to decide what is the “best” photo? When you really stop and think about it, it makes no sense.
I have been to two of the Natural History Museum’s “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” presentations at our local museum, and was simply not impressed by most of the photos. Yes, some were very good, but many were what I would deem as ho-hum, or just far too abstract, while some (even one “winner” in one particular category) were truly terrible, with boring subject matter, poor composition and one loaded with digital noise! It dawned on me that I see better images EVERY DAY on Instagram by other talented photographers, but those images remain invisible because they weren’t entered in a particular contest.
Is it the sad, historical habit of most humans to submit to some imagined authority which results in the masses mindlessly nodding in agreement that “this must be true because this "special person" said it is”?
*This of course does not apply to the contests I have won – chortle.
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