2004 Judging Notes - by Berkley White of Backscatter

Acetate to pixels...
Time has certainly flown... This was the 10th year for Gayle, Rich, and I to produce the Monterey Shootout. Not long ago we were worried about the film developers cooking slides in time for the Sunday morning rush. Now we're mostly concerned with removable media and not smoking our drives...

Here I hope to address our most frequently asked question... "What goes on in the judging room and why didn't my image win?"

Exposing the underbelly of the judging room...
Our Monterey judges for 2004 included professional photographer Jim Watt, Kevin McDonnell of Sea & Sea and myself. This year I asked the contestants and my fellow judges to adhere to the following criteria...

"Primary consideration should be based on the artistic beauty of an image. Criteria such as commercial value, technical difficulty, or rarity of subject matter should be secondary considerations and used to help determine award ranking. Please ask yourself this question, "Would I put this image on my own wall?"

My primary goal was to give the contestants a shooting goal and to help minimize the unpredictable nature of judged art contests. Before plugging in the power cords and filling up the coffee cups, we realized that much of our previous judging experience was to be thrown out the window....

No longer would the common, easily captured subject receive quick elimination. Nor could we say, "Wow, I haven't seen one of those in years." We now had to evaluate each image as an artifact for our own wall.... an image that we would want to look at for years to come.

With great help form Jim's well travelled, but non-local perspective we recalibrated our vision and quickly found ourselves chanting the mantra, "Yeah, it's great but would I want it on my wall?"

Perspective change...
The Shootout has frequently rewarded images of rare subjects, well positioned divers, and difficult lighting techniques. However, we quickly found that simple images with strong graphic lines or moody lighting were selected for the final round. While many images exhibited technical skill and commercial value, we found them better for magazines and less attractive when judged as wall art.

Properly lit images of divers received long pause, but failed to compete with the vivid color and stronger compositions of the macro subjects. The common "fish head" shot seemed to offer more emotion and was certainly aided by brilliantly lit eyes and personality.

Images of exciting or less common subjects were recognized overall, but were superceded by more simple compositions. Even the icon of Monterey, the Macrocystis kelp frond, made its way back into favor.

New Photoshop rules...
In an effort to move away from flat raw digital images, we allowed Photoshop adjustments in all digital photo categories this year. Many contestants mentioned concern that a fellow shooter's magical Photoshop prowess would allow them to dominate with any image. The results certainly proved that you first have to nail the exposure and focus and then rely on Photshop to enhance the color and contrast.... gently.

Unfortunately, many great images looked like they received a Photoshop sledge hammer rather than subtle enhancement. These images had extreme contrast and most suffered from bleeding red saturation.

New video rules...
This year we allowed full editing for all video entries and were thrilled with the results. Tightly edited videos with fast cuts and multiple subjects were more captivating regardless of the commonality of the subjects. These fast cuts kept us watching and made us want to view the clip again. Audio certainly enhanced the viewing experience.

It was pointed out that we gave less guidance to the video shooters and will certainly correct this next year. Expect to see an new judging guideline for video in 2005.

Thank you....
Thanks to all contestants and our fantastic sponsors for making the event so successful. Please give us your feedback to help make it even better next year.

Berkley