Print Competition - or Print Education?

It's that time of year when photographers everywhere are preparing images for Print Competition. It's really a lot less about "competing" with others, however. It is a lot more about the inner challenges you make with yourself and the educational value it holds for you in your photographic career.

When I entered my first competition nearly 30 years ago, I picked my 4 best selling images from that year, made 4 16x20 prints and sent them off to PPA. I even included the extra fee so they would send me the critique; I wanted to hear how good I was.

When I received the case back from them some months later, I was shocked to learn that my highest scoring print was a 68. 68!?!? (Remember, you're shooting for 80 and above; anything below 70 gets put back in the case and doesn't even get displayed!)

I wasn't very happy. I popped the tape into the player to hear the critique and the judge's voice said something about "I'm not sure how much experience you have in this . . . while these are probably images the clients enjoyed, they're not at all what we are looking for in professional competition."

I was PISSED. "Screw them. The first ribbons I want are green ones with dead presidents on them. Who cares about print comp, anyway."

Fast forward to a year from then. A friend of mine drops by the studio because he had invited me to go along to the meeting of the local PPA Affilliate. "Oh, and it's print competition; bring some prints!" he says (as he's pulling prints out of frames on my wall.)

So . . . I go along to watch this. As I'm watching, one of the judges says to the others "If we're just handing out ribbons, we're doing ok, but if we're trying to help the makers prepare for PPA competition, we're not helping anyone by being lenient with our scoring."

Guess whose prints came up next? Yup - mine. 73, 71, 70. I listened to the comments, but knew I was done entering. Forever. This print comp thing sucked.

The next day I'm putting my prints back on the wall and the judges' remarks are still going through my head.

"The lighting is too flat and broad."
"Her hand looks like a claw."
"Cropping on this is too tight."

I had a session that afternoon, so I loaded a 220 roll instead of a 120. (For those of you who never shot film, that means I used a 2g card instead of a 1g. )

I used the first 10 frames to do the session the way I normally would have and the second 10 frames to do what the judges said (mostly just to prove those bastards wrong.) When the film came back from the lab later that week, I looked through the images and was stunned . . . the second set looked so remarkably different, I never even showed the client any of the first 10.

It completely changed how I handled every session. My old "style" was no longer . . . it just didn't have the same impact. Images I would have shown the client in the past were now ending up in the reject pile . . .their only purpose was to show me what I'd done wrong and how to correct it.

Take the time to look at the work of others who have been successful in print competition. The link below will take you to a few galleries of various makers' work that did well in competition.

http://mnppa2.com/main/members/galleries/

As Travis Gugelman says "If you want to be fat, eat what fat people eat. If you want to be successful, do what successful people do."

Good luck!

(BTW - I lied when I said I was done entering . . . I received my Master of Photography Degree in 1998.)

- David Grupa