The past week or so I have been thinking about fun and photography. As a professional photographer I have found that most photographers don’t really enjoy going out and taking photos any more. At one point in time they looked forward to picking up the camera and finding something to shoot. Then once they become pro – photographers they tend to want to put the camera down at the end of the day and not look at it again until the next work day or the next assignment. Some how I have found a way to love taking photos even though I am a pro – photographer. I enter photo competitions for fun (More on this later) and I like doing photo shows, I like just about any subject to photograph so it is still fun to pick up the camera and go out and create amazing images. I hope I can keep my enthusiasm for photography!

I have been entering photo competitions for about 20 years now and for the most part I still enjoy it. It started when a friend of mine invited me to a local Camera Club here in Colorado Springs. It is the oldest photographic club in the nation! It was great going in and having a judge talk about images and tell me where I could do better or what they love about my images. It was a great time and I really looked forward to the competitions. Then one day politics entered the club. People were fighting over what image should win, and they would complain about the judges and the job they did. We quickly went from having 40 to 50 members at every meeting to having 10 to 15 members. We couldn’t find judges so we ended up having the same handful of judges over and over. The competitions were no longer fun and I moved on.

Here we are 20 years later and I have been participating in competitions through another photo club. I have loved the competitions. We have different judges each month and have only had one or two repeats in the past 8 years. The competitions have just been fun and I have enjoyed them. People joined the competitions for the fun of it and we could draw 30 to 50 members entering the monthly competitions. Over the past 8 years we only had a few complaints and two or three people that would complain consistently We cannot please everyone all the time. Well, this last month everything changed.

One of the images in the competition was too large for the rules. Some how members decided that it was my obligation to monitor the images that were submitted? I have never had this obligation in the past but as club president they decided it was up to me. Either: no members noticed the image, members didn’t think it would be appropriate to bring it to my attention, members didn’t think about it before the competition or if they did they didn’t have enough investment in the club to bring it to my attention. The image was clearly too large and perhaps I should have noticed but, with dozens of other things going on that were part of making the club work I didn’t notice or pay attention. The final result is the image won the grand prize! After the competition a few members complained to me. I asked them to please let me know if they see a problem in the future BEFORE the image is judged and I will take it out. I said that since it has already been judged it stands! (I knew right away that no matter what decision I made at that point, that people were going to be upset and feel that it was unfair!) It was a very difficult position that I found my self in. Had the participant been notified before the judging, the image could have been taken out of the frame, and it would have been within the limits of the competition rules and could have been entered. But it was judged while too large. It was clear that no matter what was decided at that point the competition was not about having fun and getting feedback for some people it was about winning and the rules are rules and “it is all Bill’s fault because he didn’t do something about it!”

A second issue came up for some members. We have volunteer judges that usually have no affiliation with the club. This month I selected an expert on the images that were to be judged. She is one of the top in our community but, she made one mistake in her comments. She used the term “impressionist” when she meant to say “expressionist.” In the minds of some participants, all of a sudden she didn’t know anything about the topic and it became “Bill’s fault” as he selected the judge! All of the images that won fit the category and they were outstanding images and deserved the awards they got for the category. After the judging I was approached by two members that stated that one of our members “accosted” the judge at the end of the evening. Another member complained that one of our members was very inappropriate toward our judge! I found this to be truly disturbing! We have never had this problem in the past but it is already having ramifications in the art community. It is going to be more difficult to find judges in the future.

In the above situations I have found that some people are not looking for solutions to problems, they want to have things their way and if they don’t get it their way they would just assume not participate at all! So what ever happened to having fun in photography? What happened to learning from the process? How did it get to the point that victory was more important than having fun? I don’t know the answers to the above but, I can say that this last competition was the first I have had for years that was not fun for me. It was clearly not fun for a handful of others, and it has made a number of people bitter altogether.

My hope is that we can pull back together and have FUN with our competitions again. I hope we can make some decisions that will help catch issues of images that don’t qualify before the competition starts, I hope that when people are frustrated with a judge they can keep it to themselves and not strike out at our judges or speak poorly of them to others. I hope that people that take the competitions so seriously can find a club that better meets their competitive needs and be a part of our club in a way that makes them more comfortable. My hope is that our members and I can enjoy the competitions that come up over the next several years. I hope to have fun with photography!

Just my thoughts.

Bill