How to Lose a Photo Contest

I entered the shot above in a photo con­test dur­ing Pho­to­shop World. It didn’t win. If it did, I’d have an entirely dif­fer­ent post today. In fact, I actu­ally thought that I was going to write my Pho­to­shop World 2012 wrap-​up today, but some­thing urged me to write this post about the photo con­test instead.

Photo con­tests gen­er­ally don’t inter­est me at all. This one had some­thing going for it, though. Nikon Pro­fes­sional Ser­vices offered up a Nikon D800 cam­era and Nikon 24-​120mm lens as the first prize for the Real World Con­cert Pho­tog­ra­phy pre-​conference course. Now that’s an atten­tion grab­ber! Although I took this pre-​con a cou­ple of years ago, I decided to try again. In my mind, it was a gam­ble. I pay $199 for the pre-​con and have, at worse case, a 1:40 shot at win­ning a $4300 prize. It wasn’t about the cash value, though. I really wanted that cam­era and lens. I obsessed about it. I planned for it. I walked into that course with pre­con­cep­tions of the win­ning image that I would sub­mit. (note: pay atten­tion to the use of “pre­con­cep­tions”, because it comes up later). Ulti­mately, I all the things I said that I wouldn’t and few of the things I said I would.

The Real World Con­cert Pho­tog­ra­phy course itself is great. I had a won­der­ful time tak­ing it and shoot­ing. The band was great, there was plenty of light­ing and more than enough time to get the shots I needed. There was also a same-​day dead­line of 10:00pm to sub­mit one, and only one, photo for an entry. That gave us about five hours to choose, process and deliver a photo.

Except, I had other plans. Lit­er­ally. The first was a group din­ner that started 30 min­utes after the course ended. I ended up doing all of my work right there at the din­ner table. My friends saw the shots I selected and folks gave me their input. After com­ing up with a bunch of picks, it was a mat­ter of edit­ing them down to one shot, and then pro­cess­ing that image. Then I went up to my room to e-​mail it (which almost didn’t work) before I had to leave for yet another group event at 8:00pm.

From all of the class entries, the instruc­tors (Alan Hess and Scott Diussa) nar­rowed things down to the final three. Then it was up to a pop­u­lar vote dur­ing the keynote address to pick the win­ner. So I first had to make some­thing good enough to pass the pro­fes­sional opin­ion of the instruc­tors, yet also sway the audi­ence. Alan tells me that he and Scott have rarely, if ever, picked the same one that the audi­ence picked. That hap­pened this time, too. They thought a dif­fer­ent entry would win than the one the audi­ence selected.

I over-​thought this process when hind­sight tells me it was really pretty sim­ple. My pre­con­cep­tion was pretty sim­ple. I wanted three things for my photo entry:

• Back­lit flare lighting
• Energy
• Some­one other than Scott Kelby as my subject

As you can see, that’s not the photo I entered. So why did I aban­don my plan and enter this photo? That goes back to over-​thinking my entry. As I exam­ined each of my picks, I found some tech­ni­cal rea­son to dis­miss them and was left with two shots — one of Scott and one of gui­tarist Tony Llanes. A lot of peo­ple at din­ner voted for the shot of Tony, but I veered toward this one. Some­one else made the same com­ment and there you go.

What kind of shots did I pass over as entries in this photo con­test? Let’s take a look. Although the image above was processed, these shots are right out of the cam­era — some with a bit of crop­ping. First, I’ll show you almost exactly the photo that won the photo contest.

I rejected it because I didn’t like the light on their faces. The win­ning photo used this same moment and expres­sion, and a lot of Tonal Con­trast (or some sim­i­lar pro­cess­ing). It has energy and the audi­ence responded to it enthu­si­as­ti­cally. When my photo came up next, I could hear crick­ets chirping.

I actu­ally liked this shot a lot because of the inter­play between Kale­bra and Felix, but also because of the smiles. That was some of the emo­tion I wanted. Out of the sequence of shots I took with them together, this one did the best job of keep­ing both faces in good light and expres­sion. I also had moments with Kale­bra inter­act­ing with Tony on Gui­tar and Scott Stahley on drums, but one thing or another caused me to rule them out. It didn’t res­onate with any­one else, so I cut it from the group. My hind­sight tells me that was a mis­take, but that’s hindsight.

A lot of folks thought I should have gone with this shot. They believed the green back­ground would really pop off the screen. Maybe they were right, since the win­ning photo had a green back­ground. I just wasn’t feel­ing it, though. If you think that this shot would have won, I will grate­fully accept a Nikon D800 and 24-​120mm lens from you. Very gratefully.

Here’s an exam­ple of a shot that I lined up and got blocked by another pho­tog­ra­pher at the last sec­ond. My one and only com­plaint was that a few of my fel­low stu­dents stood up full height right at the base of the stage. I’m sure it was done unin­ten­tion­ally, but I’d like to repeat the les­son we were taught in the class. Stay out of the way of your fel­low photographer’s shots. If this were an actual show and I was a pay­ing cus­tomer, that pho­tog­ra­pher would be block­ing my view of the stage. Good way to get kicked out of the pit, I’m told.

Look! Another green back­ground. That means this one could have won the photo contest.

Kind of a nice moment on one of Scott’s songs. I killed it because of all the empty mic stands. I also thought I’d need to remove that shadow on his coat from the mic stand and clone out Tony’s shirt in the back­ground. Finally, the ran­dom place­ment of the yel­low light just threw me off a bit.

I got a lot of moments dur­ing the final song when Tony and Scott Diussa went into some killer gui­tar solos. I put myself in posi­tion to catch the light flare that I wanted (not in this shot), but that’s one of the places where pre­con­cep­tion failed me. I thought about the angle of the play­ers and the lights. How­ever, Tony and Scott were play­ing to each other. So no mat­ter which side of the stage I chose to get that flare, I was also look­ing at the back of someone’s head.

Pre­con­cep­tions

Kelby Train­ing released “A Week with Jay Maisel in Paris” dur­ing Pho­to­shop World. Once I got home and started to watch, I got to a point where one of Jay’s pearls of wis­dom really res­onated with my fail­ure in this photo con­test. His advice was to avoid hav­ing pre­con­cep­tions about what you’re going to shoot. Rather, accept what you’re given. I walked into this photo con­test with ideas of flare and other things that I wanted. In my mind, I already saw the win­ning photo. Pre-​visualization at it’s best! That directed my actions. I chose where I wanted to cre­ate pho­tos of this con­cert based upon the image in my mind. Except, there was a prob­lem. Some of the light­ing cast pat­terns on the per­form­ers that just seemed bizarre to me. I rejected a ton of pho­tos because of those light­ing pat­terns. Here’s how it looked on the wall.

This is a wide shot to show how much the light­ing cast pat­terns on every­one. I zoomed in to get a shot like this on Tony, which was almost exactly what I antic­i­pated. Big burst of flare, great gui­tarist — all good. It’s just that I didn’t know what to do with the pink zebra stripes on him. I heard later that another pho­tog­ra­pher Pho­to­shopped them out for his entry in the final three. I loved the pat­terns on the wall. Many of us in the class shot from here to get those pat­terns. In fact, we were afraid that every­one would sub­mit a sim­i­lar image.

The prob­lem with pre­con­cep­tions is that you may get some­thing dif­fer­ent than you antic­i­pated. On the back of my lit­tle cam­era screen, every shot looked amaz­ing. I was smil­ing that I nailed so many shots. Then after I loaded them on my com­puter, all I could think about was “What the hell are these damn stripes?” Pre­con­cep­tions are a bitch.

Mean­while, expe­ri­enced con­cert pho­tog­ra­phers like Alan Hess and Brad Moore fired away with an apoplec­tic insou­ciance and walked away with some killer shots. It’s enough to make me want to kick them both in the shins. How­ever, it also tells me that the oppor­tu­ni­ties were there. I just went about it the wrong way.

My ulti­mate prob­lem was think­ing like a pho­tog­ra­pher. The audi­ence didn’t respond to the light or the pro­cess­ing. They didn’t care about the stripes on Tony’s head in that shot. They saw the emo­tion and that’s why the pho­tog­ra­pher who sub­mit­ted it won the photo con­test. It’s a good rea­son to win. He con­nected with them on an emo­tional level and I didn’t.

Not to say I walked away empty handed. I won a full ver­sion of Nik Sil­ver Efex Pro 2, which is worth the same amount of my entry fee. I had a great time and still broke even. That’s not such a bad gam­ble at all.

Of course, some­one on Google+ decided to let me know that my photo is unre­mark­able. There­fore, I’ve decided to give up pho­tog­ra­phy. Start­ing tomor­row, I think I’m going to make this a gui­tar blog. I suck at gui­tar, too, but at least I won’t hear about it from the guy on Google+.