Amateur Photographer
Posted: Sat 24 June, 2006 Filed under: Photography, Thoughts 2 Comments »Every year, Amateur Photographer magazine runs a competion called “Amateur Photographer of the Year”, also known as APOY, which has about ten different “rounds” of photo submissions, where people get given a theme, and have to submit photographs that fit in with that theme.
And every month, when they publish the results, I get annoyed.
You see, the competition is for Amateur photographers, which to AP means “Photographers who don’t make their living from photography”. And yes, I agree that that is the true definition of “Amateur”. But when you look at the competition results, well, sometimes you have to wonder.
In the results in the current issue – and believe me, this is a rarity – only one of the top three has been edited to within an inch of its life. I’m not having a dose of sour grapes here, because the winning image for this round is beautiful, and utterly deserves the prize. The third place one is pretty damn stunning too, and so are many of the others in the top 30 that are published. But – and this is where I get annoyed – the second place image isn’t actually a photograph.
Instead, it’s two photographs, skilfully merged in Photoshop. And yes, the merging is bloody superb – it *should* be one photo, and if it was one photo, I’d have no qualms about it being in the top three. But it’s not one photo, it’s a merge – not even a double exposure, or anything using a photographic technique that might take some skill. No, it’s Photoshop.
I can’t help but feel, when it comes to these things, that the prizes should be allocated to photos, and to a person’s skill in spotting that image, framing it, and taking it. That – to me – is what photography is about. I don’t want to see things that have been hacked, altered, merged, composited and beaten to within an inch of their lives, images manipulated in photoshop (or similar). Maybe I’m too much of a purist.
Don’t get me wrong – I use Photoshop myself. But only to do what, if I were using a film camera, I could do in a darkroom. Crops, resizes, blowups, maybe even on occasion some alteration of brightness and contrast. I like my photos to be real, to portray a scene as I’ve seen it (or, technically, as I’ve envisioned it could be, say I’m using a long exposure or something). I don’t want to portray a scene as it should be, or could be.
And when these images win in an Amateur Photographer competition, what kind of message does that send out to photographers, to people who just want to take photos?
It’s a tricky one this. In a sense it reflects the distinction between reportage and art, in that your attitude, which largely reflects mine, is that the photo is there to reflect reality. If that happens to be visually stunning, that’s a bonus, but I think subconsciously my intent is to convey a sense of what it was like to be there.
But I suppose it depends on why one is an amateur photographer. I take photos for fun, and to share with friends and family. Of course, digitalism and the internet has widened the scope of ‘friends’ but I suspect that most people who look at my photos do so for information (most of my site hits are for pictures of specific locations or specific celebrities).
I have never been an artist, so am not motivated by the creative element. AndI don’t find the artificial especialy interesting to look at. I suppose I am more interested in seeing ‘created’ paintings etc, but an artist would argue that photography, like paint, is just another medium.
/half-baked.
I agree. A prize for best photo should be seperated from the prize for best Photoshop. I spend time taking nice photos and framing them well and doing the whole ‘rule of 3rd’s‘ thing, and only rarely do I enjoy hacking in a bit of nice lighting or whatever, half as much as the actual photography bit. If a photoshopped photo wins any photography prize, it should be one for best photo editing.