Images for competitions

Underwater photography competitions always cause lots of arguments over the winning shot. "I have a much better shot of that", "He has clearly harassed that creature into that position" and "Oh, my god, how many times is she going to keep entering that whale shark shot".

Anyway, after a few chats with friends here on Wetpixel I thought it would be good to discuss two areas that cause much contention. Should there be more widespread rules in competitions regarding the sorts of images that are entered.

Competitions are particularly important in this regard because the images are held up as examples of the best of our discipline. Therefore I feel that they are under the most scrutiny and should be squeeky clean. Furthermore, the big comps also make a big difference to a photographer's standing, provide handsome prizes and can help launch UW photography careers.

The two gripes that come up from competitors most often are:

1) We have seen picture so many times before. Should images be retired once they have won?

Ideally this situation should be self-governing. Once a picture has won, and has been seen widely, its initial viewing impact is lessened and it is unlikely to win again. The problem is that most competition judges are mature, experienced UW photographers, who tend not to be scanning the web for the latest competition results. Therefore the first time they see most images is at judging time. This is poles apart from most keen competitors who tend to devour every set of competition results - and have usually seen the winners many times before in the previous competitions in the last 12 months.

The counter argument is that is it really a problem? Some people don't get to dive as much as others, so don't have a constant inflow of competitions winners. Others argue that a winning shot can stay top of the pile in competition after comp until something knocks it off its perch.

2) The second volatile issue is of animal manipulation

I think that nearly every underwater photographer is in agreement that we don't want to see harrassed or aranged wildlife in competition winning shots.

The problem, here, comes when it is not possible to tell from an image if an animal has been manipulated. But the image is unusual to the point where most experienced commentators suspect foul play - but the only person who knows for sure is the photographer. This causes much debate and winning shots tend to loose some of their gloss. Sometimes correctly, other times incorrectly.

Having biology experts on judging pannels can help. But in many cases something unusual could be natural - and it does not seem fair to exclude all images that cause some doubt. Sometimes unusual things happen in nature. But for some photographers unusual things tend happen more than others!

Anyway, that has kicked things off. Hopefully we'll get some forthright views.

Please try and keep the comments generic. I hope that this will be a constructive discussion, rather than a finger pointing "XXX clearly superglued that nudi on the nose of the whale shark..." excercise.

Alex

Great subjects!

My personal rule is "one finger on the reef". Like many I have seen people heard Ornate Ghost Pipe fish to get the shot and pull Crinoids apart to shoot the shrimp. Of course our presence affects the animal's behavior but I think we all need to keep it to the absolute minimum possible. After talking about it with my wife I have decided I can no longer sit by and watch divers grab the reef, animals or tease creatures out of holes without approaching them later and as politely as humanly possible pointing out this might not be best for the creatures we are all so fascinated with.

As far as always submitting the same photo, count me guilty. So in a step to reform my ways now that it got an "honorable mention" in the Scuba Diving Magazine contest I am officially retiring my mobila photo which even I am getting sick of.

PS: Taking the Magic Green Filter out tomorrow looking forward to seeing the results.

The other aspect to consider when images have won in multiple competitions is that many of the competitions occur around the same time of the year so the image may have been entered in multiple competitions and at the time none have been judged or, determined a winner. Different from entering an image after it has won in a competition that allows previous winners.

I think a negative for competition organizers in not allowing previous winners is that potentially the first competition gets the best images and the others may suffer from potentially less images. Does that mean that the last competition to run in the year then really has say the 20th, 21st and 22nd winning image as their first, second and third placings. The judging will be subjective and there is also no guarantee any image will ever place or place multiple times. I enter competitions that do not allow previous winners and ones that do. Personal choice.

Competitions are about raising money for the organization running them. They select there rules according to choices they and their Board make. If we disagree with their conditions then we do not have to enter those competitions. When a competition is open to all comers some choose to not enter them as they do not want to compete against professionals. Myself and some dive friends I know do not shy away from that kind of competition as we want to compete against the best. Personal choice again.

Final thought is that they are not our competitions, they are the various organizations who choose to put them on and invest the time to organize them. It is up to them to decide. If we want to impact those decisions we should join those organizations and volunteer to help with the competition. We may be better suited to help do a final assessment on whether a subject has been manipulated or not. I think this would help accomplish much more than the arm chair analysis that can occur after a competition has been announced.

IMHO

The two gripes that come up from competitors most often are:

1) We have seen picture so many times before. Should images be retired once they have won?

 

Ideally this situation should be self-governing. Once a picture has won, and has been seen widely, its initial viewing impact is lessened and it is unlikely to win again. The problem is that most competition judges are mature, experienced UW photographers, who tend not to be scanning the web for the latest competition results. Therefore the first time they see most images is at judging time. This is poles apart from most keen competitors who tend to devour every set of competition results - and have usually seen the winners many times before in the previous competitions in the last 12 months.

 

The counter argument is that is it really a problem? Some people don't get to dive as much as others, so don't have a constant inflow of competitions winners. Others argue that a winning shot can stay top of the pile in competition after comp until something knocks it off its perch.

I believe it is self governing. Besides, if contest organizers want to include or exclude previous winners, who cares. It's there contest. Who am I to gripe? The organizers and sponsors are the final arbiters of the rules. It's just like "manipulation", i.e. post processing. I don't care about the rules, I just need to know what they are so I can abide by them. My goal and style of shooting don't lend themselves to the limited manipulation rules, so I don't enter in those cases.

My preference would be for some limitation on entering previous winners. From the consumers point of view (as opposed to the photographer or judge), you don't want to look at Doug Perrine's Sardine run shot in every competition. Pretty soon, you are no longer interested in looking at the results, because they overlap too much. I haven't given it much thought, but maybe if a shot has won or placed more than 1 or 2 years prior to the competition date, it should be excluded. One could win a bunch of contests (deservedly so), but at some point it's time to move on.

2) The second volatile issue is of animal manipulation

I think that nearly every underwater photographer is in agreement that we don't want to see harrassed or aranged wildlife in competition winning shots.

 

Please try and keep the comments generic. I hope that this will be a constructive discussion, rather than a finger pointing "XXX clearly superglued that nudi on the nose of the whale shark..." excercise.

It's hard to police, but the rules should be stated clearly. Harassment can be very arbitrary, but arrangement is much less so. Somehow, someone needs to be able to challenge a shot, either before or after a competition. There would have to be evidence beyond a reasonable doubt before disqualification. Life long banning from competitions should follow. Sounds good, but I don't know the details of how you implement it. "I just an idea man, Chuck" (obscure movie quote)

Can we talk about elephant in the room? Maybe in generic terms? E.g. There are famous pros who do stuff like move the subject to a gray panel, or spear the fish with a little spear that can't be seen from the front so the darn thing will hold still.

Spear stuff so it doesn't move?!?! Now that is something.... do you have any examples where this is a known fact? Doesn''t surprise me to be honest. I am not calling you out but would love to hear about someone who freely admits that is what they did. Now that i think about it though, i suppose baiting sharks is no different and i would love to do some of those dives like the tigers and whites.

Mind you, i do know of staged shots with dead fish that have been big winners.... and the photog says is natural behaviour whereas others state it was not. I wasn't there so can't say yea or nay either way so i won't mention it.

hmmmm..

If the photog states it was a staged shot with bait etc would that lessen the impact/winning abilities of the photo? What bugs me is the statement that it was natural behaviour when it was not but no one else knows unless they were there, I guess it comes down to the honesty of the participant...

I participate in shark feeds so i am not passing judgement, just wondering about whether staged/feeding/baited shots should be allowed in natural behaviour competitions?

I guess my mother raised me too well and i could not lie like that...

Quite a few competition rules already state that an image can not be entered if it has placed in another competition and also clarifies a time frame. Some competitions also have rules that restrict entering images that have been published. Is more than this really necessary?

I agree with Todd in that with so many competitions bunched up during the same time in the year plus having overlapping entry periods it is inevitable that images might show up in multiple competitions as winners.

If someone is entering one image and collecting prizes from several competitions during what I call the competition season, then more power to them! Perhaps they took a superior image.

About the elephant... That's quite a claim to throw out. Perhaps you're exagerating about spearing animals, but if you're not and you have some kind of proof to back up your claim are you then contacting competition organizers when these people are winning?

I don't really believe this can be regulated to 100% satisfaction. Manipulation can be defined very broadly from waving a hand in front of a fan to get a pygmy to react to outright picking an animal up with your hands and moving them. In both instances, can anyone looking at the image tell?

I was thinking on my last trip instead of getting disgusted with bad behaviour underwater I'll just start taking pictures of critter fondlers...in the act.

humm interesting issues raised...

I think the pressure to come up with unusual shots is fuelling this. I mean these days is not enough having pictures that are technically and asthetically good, they also have to have an "unsual" dimension [viewpoint, behaviour, conditions,etc]. Unsual behaviour seems to have become some sort of "must have" criteria in some major annual photo competitions. Now unusual behaviour is something that can either be capture without interference [right place right time, plain luck (nothing to do with being at least in the right place, planning and lot's of patience, priviledged access to restricted areas,etc,etc] or can be induced or coaxed which is the easiest. How many times have you seen 4-5 pigmy seahorses tightly grouped together in a small area of a big fan, huh? If you harrass some animals [let's say an octupus] sufficiently in the end they will adopt an agressive posture that is not often seen [being completely fed-up of yours truly], you get the shot and you might have a decent chance of winning something. If you had taken a shot of the same octopus hunting or leisurely crusing even with some more creative lightning and framing would you have a decent chance of winning something? Don't think so, not lately i.e. I think too much emphasis is being place in the "unusual" bahavioural dimension and photographers [well some at least] are starting to resort to tactics that otherwise they would not resort to just to get a competition shot.

On the issue if a winning photo should or should not be allowed to be entered in several competitions [and win several times for e.g.], again I think that the organisers [who set the rules] and judging panel are responsible. It shows very little awareness of the judges and to be honest of the organisers. Each organiser should strive to differentiate themselves from other photo competitions, it doesn't make sense to me [if I was an organiser] to have the same or very similar winning shots to the other photo comp. that was done some time ago, no? So why not use a rule that prevents winning shots entered in a major photo comp. [major being a photo comp. in excess of X entries] to enter a subsequent photo comp.? Independently of this [i.e. the existence of good competition rules] I also think judges are not doing their job right since they do not seem to be aware of the results of recent photo comps with a decent number of entries.

On the subject of pre/post-processing, the guidelines for what is allowed and not are fuzzy. I mean restricting post-processing to what can be done with raw processing is [in my opinion] a lot since a lot can be done with ACR for e.g.[and more and more with each version]. I would like to see some explicit limits to some of the parameters, just select an open-source, multi-platform, free raw processing app out there as the reference and impose that exposure for e.g. can not changed by more than this either way or just state in the rules that the panel will use some mainstream app [again multi-platform please] and pre-processing will be limited to these parameters and within a specified range of values. An alternative would also be don't impose any limits for pre/post-processing, the image submitted is judged as is independently of the processing behind. I believe that going for one or the other end of the spectrum is actually a better solution than trying to stay midway and please both groups [just my opinion guys].

cheers Jorge

Now unusual behaviour is something that can either be capture without interference [right place right time, plain luck (nothing to do with being at least in the right place, planning and lot's of patience, priviledged access to restricted areas,etc,etc] or can be induced or coaxed which is the easiest. How many times have you seen 4-5 pigmy seahorses tightly grouped together in a small area of a big fan, huh?

This is completely natural behavior on the part of pygmy seahorses. At dusk (maybe also at dawn, but I havent seen that myself) they get together in groups as if to greet each other. I have seen this behavior several times. And that sort of shows why this discussion is never going to be settled. You can not expect everyone to know everything, and you cant know for sure that a certain animal has been coaxed. Nature is often stranger than you can imagine.

So why not use a rule that prevents winning shots entered in a major photo comp.

I think the rules that many competitions have in place are just fine. If an image has won something before a certain time (last submission date usually) you can not enter it. Whats wrong with that? It does mean that some images sometimes place in multiple competitions because the competitions have overlapping submission periods, but so what? It doesnt happen that often.

About post-processing. The wetpixel contest imho has found the perfect balance. Have a section for post-processed images, and a section for original images (with some very minor changes allowed). When in doubt, ask for the original.

Re: shark feed. I dont think shark feed/bait shots are natural behavior shots. You are coaxing the sharks to be in a place where they otherwise wouldn't be. It's like taking a giant pointer and nudging them over to your boat

cor

One solution for seeing the same images again and again is for competitions to have closing dates very close to judging and then results announced immediately. Of course this would cause the organisers some headaches, but actually it would not be that tough.

Alex

I think the major contests should do a better job of self policing and judging in general. If I was running a competition I'd want to have my own winners representing the vision of my contest and not just be adding a "me too" to someone else's previous winner. Of coarse as Alex pointed out, the readers of this thread are keenly aware of previous winners and the judges my not be....goes back to doing a better job.

As to the contests setting whatever criterion they want, that's fine. Personally, the fewer rules the better. As participants in these contests I think we can be a force for change by supporting those competitions that do a good job and not entering those that do a shitty one. Entry fees are quite high now with most contests getting $10 an entry.....that's a lot of revenue and I think there should be some accountability.

Entry fees are quite high now with most contests getting $10 an entry.....that's a lot of revenue and I think there should be some accountability.

You are assuming there are no costs associated with competitions. It is a bad assumption.

Our winners each get custom plaques. We ship them -- internationally, mostly -- and all of the prizes out. We announce winners on stage at OWU (air, hotel, prints, signs). There are IT costs associated with distributed judging (in addition to running the website). The winners have been printed in approximately 30 magazines and other publications internationally. We donate 15% of proceeds to an NGO.

You'd be surprised at how little is left. We're doing this as a labor of love, at the moment. If we did it just for the money, you'd get a little paper certificate and a prize, and that would be the end.

UPDATE: having said all of that, I agree that there should be some accountability. It took 6 months for one competition (EPIC) to notify me personally that I had won first place (!). I found out from other people and tried repeatedly to contact the organizers. There is another thread running about this happening in this year's BTS, as well. If there were no money involved, it wouldn't be an issue.

If we did it just for the money, you'd get a little paper certificate and a prize, and that would be the end.

Surely, just a PDF to print at home!

UPDATE: having said all of that, I agree that there should be some accountability. It took 6 months for one competition (EPIC) to notify me personally that I had won first place (!). I found out from other people and tried repeatedly to contact the organizers. There is another thread running about this happening in this year's BTS, as well. If there were no money involved, it wouldn't be an issue.

Dont forget CTS either. Julie has not had her price for over a year now, and the response so far has been anything from silence to 'oh but we're only volunteers'. I can understand that, but then dont run a competition. Julie has now asked for her entry fee back, because why should she pay when they are not going to actually award the prices.

So, instead of always focusing on what we photographers should do and not do, don't forget their are two sides that need to keep the balance fair.

Cor

Cor

Over a year? wow, i am stunned

What is CTS? Is that a typo for BTS, or is a different comp.

Alex

Alex, Celebrate the Sea I think

Thanks Mike. I was racking my brain. Forgotten about that one. There are so many these days.

It might be fun to calculate how many 1st, 2nd, 3rd and Honourable Mentions there are on offer each year in all the categories of the main international underwater photography competitions. I guess it is more than 500!

Alex

I think Lionfish hit on a key point and we can add to Alex's two key points. My bigger frustration with competitions is the judges. Some should not be judges due to the lack of real underwater photography experience. I have Googled some judges names and then went and looked at their websites and found that their work looks like someone shooting for the first time. I think it's unfair for an inexperienced judge who only shoots in clear, warm water to make the decision on competitors' images because they lack the talent to really tell when one image is superior over the one that placed first.

And I despise the fact that some judges set criteria after entries have already been sent in and paid for. As in, "this competition will focus on textures". Well guess what? I didn't send in any texture shots so my work doesn't make the first cut, not because they are crummy, but because criteria that I was not made aware of was set after the images were submitted.

I really don't have a problem with someone's image making the circuit from NCUPS, LAUPS, BTS, etc and winning, but that should be it for that image. As for Marticn's comments about policing other divers, it reminds me of a recent trip where I used a 12-inch long pole to use as my finger and to help steady me on the reef without laying on it. The divemaster saw me and chewed me a new one for having a prying tool. He did not understand what the pole was for. So it is clear that education and awareness about tricks of the trade to preserve and reduce potential reef damage has not been made global. But that's another topic I suppose.

Joe

It seems that every few years these discussions come up. The multiple contest winners this year were particularly evident, possibly because of the publicity offered through U/W photo forums and the fact that the winners were published in various dive mags this year. I had a sense of deja vu all too often. Then again, it proves the images chosen were strong and had impact. This is nothing new; it's been around for as long as I've been taking photos (13 years), and it used to bug me when I didn't win, and not when I did: human nature, I guess! Many contests want great images for promoting to their sponsors, hence there is no restriction on prior winners. It helps to get good prizes. That's their choice, whether we like it or not. Some contests have moved dates to address this. (LAUPS, for example) Announcing winners quickly is a good idea, but one must realize that the organizing of these competitions takes a TON of work. Just the sorting of entries, processing of entry fees, etc., takes time, and is often done by volunteers that have other jobs and commitments.

As for the "unusual" aspect being paramount in judging a photo, and the comment about judges and underwater experience being of prime importance, I would rather see an image win on artistic and technical merit rather than fitting a formulaic composition (ie wide angle of sea fan and silouetted diver with light), which I see happening sometimes (more in non-North American competitions), or because it's a photo of a rare "six gilled pygmy frogfish". I would rather see a trained photographic judge than a judge that happens to shoot underwater photos. If they are both, bravo! There are training programs available through national photographic organizations, both amateur and professional.

I think it's bad form not to tell winners in a timely fashion, and not to send prizes out. Many competition organizers make the mistake of assuming all commitments from sponsors will come through. Some don't come through with prizes as promised. When I was involved in helping to organize a major contest, we wouldn't award a prize unless it was in hand. The minute one year's contest is over, the sponsorship drive has to begin, in order to ensure the prizes are in place. It is far more work than most entrants would ever realize to convince sponsors to give you a liveaboard trip or expensive gear.

As for the "great profits" made from these contests, think again. There are associated costs, as Eric points out. I remember sending a pair of fins to a winner in Hong Kong. The shipping was over $200, which was more than the value of the fins! You may have to rent a venue for the awards, give an honorarium to the judges, etc., etc.

The bottom line is, if you don't like the way they're run, either politely write in with some suggestions, offer to help if possible, and if that doesn't work, only enter those that you feel you can support. Competitions offer a tremendous opportunity to improve your craft and gain a little recognition for a passion most would indulge anyway, regardless of the contests. There will always be dishonest people when the stakes are high; it's up to the organizers to try to maintain the integrity of the contest to the best of their ability.

Cheers,

Marli

I personally think that competitions should be run the way the scientific journals are meaning that you can submit to only one at a time. If I send a paper to Diabetes Care for example, I have to sign a pledge that I haven't submitted the paper anywhere else. That works and would work I think in the UW photo competition. If I get caught submitting to two places, then I risk getting banned from publishing from both places.

As for manipulation, I agree that it is the judges that are forcing the photographers to come up with ever more difficult poses and more graphic behaviors. Until the judges stop rewarding this type of photo, manipulation of the creatures will continue.

Bill