P3D Re: Competitions - comments by Mark Dottle

["Dr. George A. Themelis" <DrT-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark is a beginner with great enthusiasm and creative ideas in
stereo.  In his posting he mentions the problem of a picture 
that has great emotional value for the maker but gets low score 
and unfavorable critique.  

I have been in both sides of the fence on this.  As a judge, 
I see family snapshots that I know are someone's precious 
memories but still don't consider them to be above average.  
One has to be very careful when they comment about these.  
You have to put things into perspective.  If you only say 
good things then people would wonder why is the total score
low... Identify the elements that don't work well and suggest
how the photographer could avoid them and improve in the future.

As a maker I frequently enter family pictures that don't do
very well.  One time I thought I had a very nice picture
of my infant niece sitting in the piano keyboard, held by
her mom.  She was looking straight at the camera.  When it
got projected under the assignment "Music" in Detroit, it
got one of the lowest scores of the night. I was disappointed.
At the end of the competition one person asked why was this 
picture rated so low.  The judges implied that it was a snapshot
taken with on-camera flash with shadows from the flash in
the back and a plug in the wall distracting them.

We had long discussions back in P3d about what constitutes
a "snapshot".  I believe that a snapshot is a picture that is
taken without any plan or thinking ahead and it has very
little value for anyone other than the maker and his immediate
family.  For this particular picture I planned ahead,
visualized what I wanted to achieve, climbed on a ladder to get
a higher perspective (with my wife being mad at me) and spent
at least an hour to double-mask it (reducing the width) so
that the keyboard appeared to be running out of the screen
(one of these cases where a violation of the stereo window
is justified, being unnoticed).  I found the final result quite
appealing... I thought that this was my best entry for the
night, but the judges gave top score to another of my pictures,
a tabletop of CD's reflecting on each other.

George Themelis


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