Words and Light

I am blogging live as a volunteer at Pictures of the Year International, an international contest to which photographers send submissions in dozens of categories. Currently, the three judges are going through the final cut of the multimedia feature story category. At any point, you can click here to watch/listen the judging live.

I’ve also sat through the judging of science/natural history and science/natural history picture story. It seems that every year, I miss the judging of the sports categories — every year, for POYi and CPOY — because it’s always the first overall category to be judged.

POYi and CPOY always renew an interesting discussion among my photojournalism friends: the extent of post-shooting editing. I’m not going to single any photographers or images out, but the winning entries are more often than not the most heavily edited. Photoshop-induced vignetting, heavy levels clipping, massive amounts of over/undersaturation… those seem to be the overarching trends.

As far as Photoshop and post-shooting editing goes, I personally am fairly conservative. I am comfortable with and often do the following in Photoshop/RAW Editor:

• altering the tonal contrast (within reason) via Levels or Curves
• correcting color via Levels, Curves, Selective Color (in extreme cases) and white balance editing in RAW Editor
• sharpening via Unsharp Mask
• cropping (unless it changes the essence/meaning of the photo)
• eliminating spots on the sensor via Clone Stamp

Only in rare instances do I use the Dodge/Burn tool.

But to get beyond the penultimate cut in POYi and CPOY, it seems that you have to add the following tools to your usual toolkit:

• LOTS OF BURNING (for everything, but especially creating vignetted corners!)
• LOTS OF SATURATION
• LOTS OF SELECTIVE COLOR
• LOTS OF CONTRAST (especially if the image is black and white)

Again: I’m not going to cite any particular photographers or photographs. But take a look at this year’s POYi winners (so far) and the last winners of CPOY, and you’ll see what I mean.

But right now, the judges have just determined the winners of the multimedia feature story category. The main issue seems to be how tightly edited the piece is, in terms of length, story editing and use of tools (photo, video, audio [background noise, narration, music?], other, all of the above, some of the above?).

One judge noted that having photographers put multimedia pieces together is like Portuguese vs. Spanish. Portuguese speakers and Spanish speakers can generally understand each other, but a Portuguese poet can’t write poetry in Spanish — and vice-versa. Likewise, the judge said, it’s difficult to ask photographers to gather audio and incorporate it with photography effectively.

I certainly understand what the judge meant. Some of us are just better suited for visual storytelling; others are better suited for the written report, and others for other kinds of journalism. And personal opinion: within a news team working on a story, issue or beat, I’d rather have several reporters who are specialized and extremely talented within different fields to create an amazing story over a single one-man-bandstand who can do everything but not well.

But that’s just the way journalism is going these days.

And now the judges are done for the day! I’m outta here.