99 seats to watch POYi judging live, online

POYi judging begins in the morning. Live streaming returns through Adobe's system with a lot more hours to be streamed than last year. Rick Shaw told me they'll have the system up as much of the time as possbile.

But there are only 99 slots available for viewing at a time. You can believe I'll be dropping in whenever possible, and dropping a comment or two as things progress, which is almost as much fun as listening to and seeing the judging.

Fingers are crossed for the people I helped edit entries.

See you there.

And World Press judging is going on. You can hear comments by the panel chairs about the first round of judging last week here.

When friends come to town

Gerd Ludwig talks at Syracuse University and Brenda Ann Kennealy talks at RIT.Nothing could be finer than when friends comes to town to give talks. Well, maybe there are some finer things but it sure was nice to catch up with Gerd Ludwig and Brenda Ann Kenneally in the last few days.

Gerd came to Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communication - which happens to be where my wife teaches interactive design - and showed a compelling selection of his work from the land that once was the Soviet Union. Gerd and I worked on two stories together at National Geographic. We got to catch up.

Brenda gave a talk at Rochester Institute of Technology just last night, showing a broad swath of her work, talking about what motivates her and more. Her work is a jigsaw of a myriad of complex relationships. Our paths have crossed several times, the best time was to teach a workshop in The Dominican Republic that was created by Lelen Robert and Loup Langton.

Proximity to New York and Washington, D.C. is a bonus to living in Syracuse. Here's to friends.

Question from Libby: How do you know it’s good?

As a followup to the previous post, Libby asks: How do you know when a shot has that X Factor, especially if it’s outside the realm of acceptable technical parameters?

By X factor, I’m taking the meaning to be a superb photograph. Knowing when a picture is phenomenal is tough, especially if you made it and you’re using non-standard processing.

Photographers definitely don’t accurately perceive the quality of their work consistently enough to use that as a measure of quality. Some photographers put forth mediocre work as if it were God’s gift to the planet; other photographers sheepishly offer amazing photographs.

I’ve found that offering a neutral impression of your work is most effective, when you’re dealing with editors. Don’t put it down or elevate it beyond what’s there. Saying: “It is what it is, I’ll be eager to hear what you think,” is what I like to hear. That way it doesn’t set me up to expect a lot or a little; I can come to the work with fresh impressions.

But that doesn’t help determine when a photo is great. You would think that if the color, light, moment and composition are all exceptional, then the photo should be great, especially if the subject matter is engaging. But if there is limited perception/impression on the photographer’s part and the photographer didn’t set out to do more than make those four things work, then it still wouldn’t be a great photograph.

I do know that when a variety of people are choosing from a set of pictures - such as judging a contest - the top image in a group rises to the top universally, or nearly so. In other words, in a contest setting, the first place image is the easiest to agree upon, while third brings the most argument. So there must be universal aspects to successful photographs.

Some people say great photography is like pornography: You know it when you see it.

Maybe you could ask a series of questions about a given photograph: Do I feel something from it, does my eye travel from point to point of the frame down to the smallest of elements that still engages somehow, do those four aspects work, would I hang this on my wall, do I care about what was photographed because of the way the photograph was made.

And maybe you could ask a bunch of people. I used to that in publishing environments. It’s also educational to see which pictures people respond to and to learn what draws a response.

I see that there’s now software to determine which are the best pictures in a set of similar images. How helpful. If only it worked. Rather, thank God it doesn’t work.

A poobah at the White House once told me to never make a major decision quickly. Time does help determine if a photograph has that magical quality. Removing the emotional layer connected to the making of a picture and the significance you might see that others don’t gets easier over time. But who can wait 20 years.

A bunch of people send me pictures asking if I think they’re good. That’s another option.

Where’s the line on toning photos, especially for contests?

My aunt asked me for recommendations of software that would easily allow her to remove people or objects from photos. At first, I fired up an ethically infuriated head of steam. How dare anyone remove objects from a sacred image?

Silly reaction, no?

Then I got to thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice if there were universal agreement about how much post production application to images is acceptable, especially as it applies to contest entries?

That’s like saying, wouldn’t it be nice if we all agreed about who makes the best car? There are people who don’t think we should be driving cars, those who are emphatic about a particular brand being the best, others who are oblivious of the nuance of cars and yet others who could care less what they drive, as long as it drives.

And so it is with post production of images. Some people think there’s a line in the sand that can’t be crossed, others don’t see the line, others think there shouldn’t be a line and others yet think the line swerves here and there depending on where you cross it.

There are so many layers to the issue that it’s like trying to hold a swarm of worms in your hands when all you want to do is put one worm on a hook and go fish.

Those in the art and commercial and advertising worlds must think this a paltry, pointless discussion. And yet, even in those worlds, the further the path strays from some form of reality, the less likely the message falls on willing ears.

The core principles in the story telling realm seem to be tied to the notion of altering physical reality, falsifying the truth, presenting a situation not as it appeared to be.

But these days, most debate noise comes from adjustment of images and it’s a negative action mostly if the adjustment happens after the image was made. I’ve heard many an argument against instagram and hipstamatic images from the iPhone because they alter saturation, shadow density, exposure and such things after the image was made. It is post production and therefore changes the real image. That argument is absurd.

The core determinant, for me, is whether objects were moved, people’s faces were changed, images were combined in a way that altered what anyone would have seen in the setting, or if things were removed from the frame. The Washington Post has run a few HDR images of scenes, which by their nature combine multiple exposures into one frame to get a higher range of detail than cameras can now record. I’m ok with HDR.

The degree to which people get pissed off about this issue is astounding. It’s as if clinging to an extreme set of rules that say never do this/always do that somehow elevates their work and protects them from innovation and evolution. Having rules in photography is like trying to rigidly control traffic in a Rome traffic circle.

I’d rather follow principles than rules. Forget rules such as: You cannot alter the saturation beyond 5 percent of the original capture; you can’t put frames around photos, their is no post production allowed that presents an extreme of the actual setting.

Instead, follow guidelines or principles and practices that seek to accurately reflect your impression of what you’ve photographed. That impression is ideally formed through your connection with and understanding of the subject. The goal is to elicit responses from photographs that convey a quality of the subject photographed.

There isn’t a set of rules that could contain the breadth of what’s possible in the photographic medium. So why put them out there, except at the extreme end of what happens - adding elements that were not in the scene, changing the physical structure of elements.

Then it’s up to the individual setting to determine if a given set of photos is appropriately handled. If that’s a scary proposition, then loosen your sphincter.

On the passing of Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold passed away this week. It's sad whenever someone with great talent dies.

I'd never met her but her pictures touched me in an unexpted way. During her travels to produce "In America", Eve Arnold stopped in Craig, Nebraska, which happened to be holding its annual town picnic that day. Two photos from the picnic are in the book. The pictures show people that I once knew.

Craig was then a town of about 250 people. It's where my parents grew up and 7 miles from where I grew up, in a much larger town of 1,800. My uncle and two cousins still farm in the Craig area. 

I bought Eve's book a long time ago, early in my photographic life, not knowing that she had been to Craig. Turning the pages for the first time and landing on the photos from Craig was like getting a present from the past. It made me remember the outfits my mom would make for us to wear in the Craig Picnic Parade. My favorite was when my brother, sister and I dressed as pioneers and our red wagon became a Conestoga. Memories.

Some people in Craig told me a few years ago that they still remembered the famous photographer who passed through so long ago.

That's one of the powers of photography, I guess: To create connections and enliven the past. Thank you Eve Arnold.