It’s been forty years since I left college and stepped out into the bright world of employment. When producing photographs to commission for magazines and advertising clients, your job is simply to acquire pleasing likenesses of faces and places to a deadline. All the “arty nonsense” I’d studied for my degree was almost immediately shoved to one side by the urgencies of work. It was exciting but also stressful. Decades later, I still have nightmares about turning up for a job having forgotten my film… or the camera battery… or lights… or arriving late… or going to the wrong address... or all of these things together on a single job!

The imperative to acquire images makes perfect sense in the world of commercial photography. Your livelihood depends upon each image fulfilling the clients’ brief. And if not, well there’s always another photographer (just out of college or a friend of the client’s) who will do it for less money and sometimes better.

However, I have long been puzzled by the sometimes aggressively acquisitive attitude of non-professional landscape photographers since there’s no client breathing down their necks.

A recent article on fstoppers.com highlighted, once again, the issue of photographers battling to secure images at a honeypot location.

In an excellent, humorous, piece of writing, Brian Christianson tells the fictional tale of a scuffle between photographers, just after dawn at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park. This resulted in broken bones and $50,000 of broken gear. In the final paragraph he notes that all the ensuing fuss on social media and in the press, far from putting visitors off, resulted in a huge increase of people wanting to see sunrise through the arch.

The jockeying for position at this location is not a particularly new thing, although there are definitely more people visiting now than even twenty years ago.

My one and only visit to Mesa Arch was in 2001 on a photography tour co-led with Joe Cornish. Joe had been at least once before. We rose early for the 45min drive from Moab to the Arch, arriving well before dawn. Joe had warned us to expect other photographers, but we hoped with a 4am departure that we would be the first. A group of Germans, prototypically, had got there before us. Our party wove themselves between their tripod positions and I stood to one side. Clients come first, after all. I set up my Technika and awaited the sunrise. One of the other group came and stood next to my camera position. Just as the sun rose, he moved in front of my camera to make his images. Annoying… but I saw no reason to start a fight next to a thousand foot drop. He eventually finished and I made a couple of exposures which I was quite pleased with. My briefly interrupted view was nothing to get too het up about.

The size of the crowd (then or now) wouldn’t matter if everyone were there just to admire the view, to drink in the moment. (Although, imagine if the audience contained documentary photographers; what an opportunity!) But I challenge any of you to say, hand on heart, that you haven’t felt a frisson of annoyance because someone has got “in your way” or – even worse – walked on your pristine snow, mud, sand.

Many of the people in the recent battle would consider themselves landscape photographers. The rest might not define themselves as Instagrammers or vloggers or bloggers, but they were almost certainly planning to post their images on social media. Perhaps they simply wanted to show how wonderful their lives are or they were incentivised by ‘Likes’, craving a dopamine hit. Just don’t get in the way; Hell hath no fury like an addict denied their fix.

It’s also important to note that some of the participants in the recent ‘battle’ were paying photo tour leaders a considerable amount of money for the privilege of making images in the company of those leaders. This no doubt fed into the leader’s less than charitable response to someone wandering in front of his group to make iPhone panoramas.

All these people were united in wanting to capture a view unspoilt by the presence of fellow humans. Unless, of course, it was a selfie with (or without) their significant other. They might have been unable to verbalise their desire but basically they wanted to acquire an image of Eden before the fall from grace. They say the camera never lies when in fact it almost always lies by omission. The most frequently told lie is that you might be able to visit these places on your own. That deception is quite an incentive to travel. This humorous advert from 100% Pure New Zealand is a great example of the likely truth. https://youtu.be/Trs-isdu4eE

This is far from the only example of the acquisitive side of landscape photography. In a 2013 article for On Landscape I mention the regular autumnal dawn scraps at Maroon Bells in Colorado (Tripod Wars). Similar high tension situations also regularly arise in Zion N.P., where photographers cluster to snap The Watchman at sunset, and in Yosemite in February for the “Natural fire fall” at Horsetail Falls. Rangers at the latter location have taken the unprecedented step of closing two of the viewpoints and requiring photographers to walk for a mile-and-a-half in order to thin the crowd.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, although it has become more intense. Even before the digital era there were locations that proved so popular with photographers that access had to be limited. Frederick H Evans’ famous image “A Sea of Steps” inspired an army of copycats. This forced Wells Cathedral to take action to stop countless tripod feet eroding stone at a faster rate than generations of sandaled priests and choristers.

Not all – perhaps not even the majority – but many of these people are consuming these locations rather than communing with them; they are treating places as products. This is perhaps unsurprising given that, in the West, we are trained to become consumers from a very young age. (Sadly, I feel that many landscape photographers treat place as product on all of their photographic expeditions, not just the ones to popular locations.)

In Tripod Wars, I proposed that photography at honeypot locations can bear a similarity to competitive sport. I wonder now if it is not more akin to the mad jostling through the doors of a store on Black Friday. For me, the greatest tragedy in these often stressful circumstances is that there’s no time, in the words of W.H. Davies, to “stand and stare”, no opportunity to commune, certainly no chance to enter flow state.

We tend to think of the very-nearly mandatory act of photographing everywhere we go as an attribute of the digital era, a phenomenon that has arisen due to the unholy alliance of social media, digital “capture” and the ubiquity of mobile phones. After all, everyone – as the well-worn line goes – is a photographer now. In truth, the link between location and the desire to make an image is much older.

Coloured engraving of Lotbinière’s Acropolis

As Peter Osborne points out in Travelling Light, there has been a strong association between tourism and photography ever since its invention. The Acropolis, in Athens, was first photographed in October 1839. Frenchman Pierre-Gustav Joly de Lotbinière used the new method barely eight weeks after the French Academy of Sciences had gifted Louis Daguerre’s invention to the world. (Presumably he was Daguerreotypist since the term photographer had not yet been coined?) Despite not being the only photographer on his expedition, De Lotbinière is credited with being the very first ‘travel photographer’. His image unintentionally became a marketing shot for the nascent tourism industry. This was, however, far from the first time that images of exotic locations had effectively been used to sell trips.

For over 150 years prior to the Napoleonic Wars, The Grand Tour was an almost compulsory multi-year jolly around Europe for the scions of England’s great families. The Tour was undertaken almost exclusively by males. Ostensibly its purpose was to provide the first tourists with an education in history, architecture, music, and other arts. Theory, however, didn’t always align well with practice. In The Meaning of Travel, Emily Thomas describes the travails of the “bears”, those charged with steering the out-of-towners away from gold-diggers and dens of gambling or debauchery. Along with frittering away the family silver on dubious pleasures, the Grand Tourists also commissioned paintings and sketches from well-known artists as mementoes. These in turn inspired others to visit particular locations.

For a certain class of people, this was the golden age of travel; a time when only a select few (Englishmen!) went to places that are now rammed with the great unwashed. From this viewpoint the rot set in in 1841- just two years after de Lotbinière’s “first travel photo” - when an Englishman named Thomas Cook founded his famous travel agency. We might think that finding too many tourists at a location is a modern phenomenon but the Irish novelist Charles Lever railed against Cook’s early clients, writing that “…the cities of Italy are deluged with droves of these creatures.” He describes Cook’s service as reducing “…the traveller to the level of his trunk” and obliterating “every trace of the individual.” Sound familiar? Lever even went so far as to suggest to Italian friends that, because Australia was fed up with being a penal colony, Great Britain was now sending her convicts to the continent posing as tourists.

This was the very beginning of the tourism pandemic. A century on from the founding of Thomas Cook, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) estimated that internationally there were just 25 million tourist arrivals in 1950. Sixty-eight years later this number had increased to 1.4 billion international arrivals per year. A 56-fold increase!

When Joe Cornish and I first went to Horseshoe Bend in Arizona there wasn’t a car park, you left your car by the road outside Page and walked across the desert for about a kilometre. Now there’s a “newly enlarged” parking lot for hundreds of vehicles and you must pay a minimum of $10 to park there. From memory, there were half a dozen other people when we visited in 2001. It is now the City of Page’s No. 1 attraction.  When we first went to Lower Antelope Canyon you could stay all day to photograph for a flat admission charge. Now you’re only allowed on a tour, and tripods are banned.

Tell the young “togs” today how it used to be and they won’t believe you!

By incontinently sharing location info, photographers – including myself – are certainly partially to blame for some places becoming crowded.

Nature First, an organisation dedicated to helping photographers behave responsibly in the landscape, share my concern.

Somewhat ironically, seventeen years ago I received a lot of flak over the lack of captions in Landscape Within. People thought I was hoarding location info in order to deny others. I was accused of wanting to “pull up the ladder behind me”. My reticence then about naming the locations was simply because I wanted the images to stand on their own, without the mental baggage that goes with knowing where a photo was made. If I were to publish another book, I would definitely keep the info to myself, this time in order to help protect the places. By-the-by, there’s a delicious irony about photographers liberally sharing GPS coordinates on the one hand whilst wishing to have their special places to themselves on the other. I should, of course, state that people who consider themselves landscape photographers are far from being the only offenders. Even the otherwise right-on Guardian has regular features about “ best kept secrets” and “Top Ten places to visit”.

In a seeming paradox, photographers are even more upset if the majority of visitors are fellow photographers. Are they worried that all the light will be used up?

This paradox springs from the fact that photographers’ peers are seen as both their preferred audience and their competition for the acquisition of images. Photographers want to brag about where they’ve been to people who they think will appreciate it. But simultaneously they don’t want any other photographers to visit that place (at least not on the day they’re there).

For the vast majority this isn’t about commercial competition, no livelihoods are endangered – although try telling Michael Fatali, or “influencers” on Instagram that... So what is it that gets photographers’ tripods all in a tangle? It’s simply fighting over a limited resource.

We could look at motivations, such as the aforementioned desire to get a social media hit, but I don’t think this goes deep enough. Fundamentally I think the frustration (and aggro) derives not from surface motives but from a deeper mindset.

A big clue comes from the words we use to describe the act of photographing; we commonly say ‘take a photograph’. In the digital era, “Good capture!” is now a familiar compliment(?) on social media and forums.

Take and capture are obvious synonyms for acquire.

I argued in Landscape Beyond that the word ‘make’ was more appropriate since photography is a creative act. I was far from the first to take this position, indeed this is a debate as old as photography. Long before I was born Ansel Adams wrote “You don’t take a photograph, you make it!”

“Take” is problematic in many ways, not least because it can infer both a passive and an aggressive act. It can suggest that images are lying around waiting to be picked up by any passing photographer. But there’s also a hint of force, a suggestion that the subject did not surrender easily.

“Great capture” reinforces this interpretation, with a malodorous whiff of the hunt. The wonderful thing about a photo is that you don’t need a taxidermist to preserve your trophy; pixels have a near infinite shelf life and the corpse comes pickled in 2:3 aspect. We need only find a suitable means to display it so that we (and, perhaps, an audience) may feast our eyes upon it at our leisure.

It is undeniable that in one important sense photography is all about taking, all about acquisition. Photographers, like other artists, are trying to capture beauty. This is not simply something that pleases the eye, not the anodyne quality celebrated in beauty contests. It’s also much more than the prettiness typified by a beauty spot. Beauty in this sense is a combination of aesthetic qualities that also pleases the intellect, that is an expression of a deeper truth.

William Somerset Maugham put it much more eloquently: ‘Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.’ Maugham’s quote suggests there’s an appetite at the base of all art. Yet you don’t see hangry writers (or painters) punching each other in front of a spectacular view. There have, of course, been artistic spats – passionate disagreements over lost commissions or who is taking the “right” approach. Clearly, taking away their pens or brushes might make them fume, but I know of no instances where blows were traded simply because two writers, or painters were creating in the same space.

The question is “What makes photographers different from writers or painters?”

Fundamentally, for the writer or painter the creative act predominantly takes place within their minds. This is only partially true for the photographer. The respective creative acts might seem on a par since the photographer’s mind mediates reality in a similar way to a writer or painter. But there is a crucial difference. What a writer or painter creates might be linked to a place or event, but it is not solely contingent on them.

A photograph, on the other hand, is inextricably determined by what is in front of the camera. It is literally impossible to divorce it from a specific time and place. We might not recognise the location from the photo (or vice versa) but – whatever manipulations are employed post facto – reality is the indispensable resource, the base ore, from which photographers fashion their vision.

Since reality is hardly in short supply, you might think the requirement to have something in front of the lens isn’t much of a constraint. The problem lies in the fact that in any field of photography the majority of practitioners tend to seek a small subset of reality. In the landscape genre that subset would include sunrise/set, golden hour, blue hour, mountains, waterfalls, beaches etc.

Surely that still leaves plenty to go at? Well, sort of...

The selection of a portion of reality is the key skill of a photographer. Reality only appears in relatively short supply because we’re overly selective. It can’t be just any waterfall, any beach, or any mountain: Only an even smaller subset of more desirable ones will do. When we see an image of a place that we like, there’s a natural desire to want to go to that place and photograph it – there is a desire to acquire it. The more alluring locations’ fame builds with every shutter click, every like and every share. This further concentrates the demand for particular variants of reality. And everyday grey skies aren’t enough; the light and/or weather needs to be spectacular or moody (or even extreme). If we imagine a Venn diagram of all these factors it becomes clear that the area of overlap gets smaller in inverse proportion to the increasing number of desirable attributes.

This competition for photo acquisition infamously reaches its peak amongst paparazzi, each elbowing and jostling for a scoop – literally a ladle – of triumph or shame. Many a subject’s life has been ruined to profit a photographer and their press baron masters.

But is it much different when countless landscape photographers’ footfalls damage an environment, crushing plants and eroding the land?

Standing in front of a truly awesome sight it’s quite hard to make an image that will not garner wows on social media. From the audience’s perspective, spectacle might easily be mistaken for artistic vision. There’s a real danger that the urge to acquire ends up extolling “being there” more than creativity. The feedback loop from social media might reinforce this flawed perception for the photographer as well.

Now, obviously, this doesn’t apply to all photographs of sunsets/waves/mountains/aurora… actually, it might apply to all the aurora photographs I’ve ever seen! There is still a skill involved in composing the image in the most powerful way. And the ability to be in the right place at the right time is also part of the skill set of any landscape photographer; reading the weather (forecast), understanding how the light will fall on a landscape at different times of day (and in different seasons), and knowing how the tides will affect what can be seen are important skills.

The examples I gave at the beginning of this article have very limited spaces from which to observe the sight or site: Mesa Arch, for instance, is 90 ft (27m) wide; The preferred view of Maroon Bells takes place along roughly 100 meters of the lake shore; The ‘natural firefall’ can only be viewed from a single designated position; Lower Antelope is narrow enough that you can touch the sides with outstretched arms. There literally isn’t room at these locations for a significant variety of compositional choices. These places are at one extreme of the reality bottleneck but there are plenty of other places that are also oversubscribed.

In these circumstances, you’re not testing your ability as a photographer; you’re simply seeing if you can be the one to grab a bargain. Even if you’re lucky enough to do so you won’t be bagging a unique, handcrafted item. At best you might be getting a personalised mass-produced commodity – you know, the kind where you pay extra to get your initials engraved on a faux silver plaque. Ask yourself how you would feel if you dressed up for a party and found that most of the attendees were wearing very similar outfits to you. Wouldn’t you rather stand out than blend in?

In part two of this article, “Nobody Expects the Inquisition”, I will be exploring how one might go about making your photography outstanding by adopting a different approach. (Clue: it’s not turning the saturation up to 60 in Lightroom…)

I’ve written quite a lot about competitions in the past but being as we’re so close to the opening of submissions for the Natural Landscape Photography Awards, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the process of judging, the potential pitfalls and how we’ve tried to mitigate some of them.

The Goals of the Competition

The first question any competition organisers should be asking themselves is “What is the goal of the competition?”. Sadly, there are many competitions that seem to exist as a marketing exercise and/or a way of making money for the organisers. We’ll try to ignore those and give our imaginary organisers the benefit of the doubt. Most competition organisers will say the purpose is “to select and showcase the best images”... as if that gets us any closer to a useful answer. The problem is that the ‘best images’ approach can lead to all sorts of creative cul-de-sacs and in most cases, the result is ‘the most wow’ images. This can end up with a very tiring and homogenous collection of classically sublime mountain, aerial and nightscape images with a few oddball compositions and lucky shots (or composites) to fill them out.

When we were planning our competition, we were keen for it to be a tool to showcase an inspiring and varied collection of images that represented some of the most interesting and creative work we were seeing online and in person. We wanted to somehow use the competition to curate a virtual exhibition that we all would love to see.

Obviously, exhibitions are hard to organise and expensive (and they don’t have a huge reach) but the next best thing, in my mind at least, is a well-produced fine art book. Therefore, we decided our goal was, essentially, to brief the judges to not necessarily find the ‘best’ or ‘most impactful’ images but to select a range of about 100 or so photographs that really represent the most inspiring work submitted. Along the way, we would obviously have to choose a set of category winners and an overall grand winner but every image in that final set should be able to stand, not just on its own but alongside all the rest of the works selected.

Who are the judges

Who should judge? Tough question. As a type of art, landscape photography is inherently subjective. Yes, there are often images that most people will like more than other images but there are also sometimes images it’s almost impossible to say they are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than others. These often inspire really strong feelings in at least some viewers. This leads to a discussion around whether it’s better that a small number of people love an image or that everybody likes an image – see our ‘scoring’ discussion for more on that.

Most people who engage in an activity at a certain level are interested in the opinions of their peers (if they want to be judged at all). For example, if I wanted someone to pick out some landscape photography books for me to buy, I’d nearly always choose other landscape photographers, and if those photographers just happened to be widely respected for their aesthetic judgement and skills, all the better.

When we were looking at which judges to ask, we had a few criteria. Some of those were pragmatic, for instance it would be great if they had a high profile to help promote the competition in this first year. But they also had to represent a wide array of styles and practices if possible.

We also wanted judges who will have seen a lot of photographs and know about the compositional and post-processing cliches, the iconic, over photographed locations, etc. so that they could recognise originality and creativity - and also notice flaws in post processing and composition when they saw them.

Judging criteria

Again, from a distance, this looks like an easy one. Just pick the best images. However, the best according to who? Are the judges choosing based on their own subjective tastes or are they trying to second guess an audience’s tastes?

When I’ve been asked to judge competitions before, I’ve had to work these criteria out for myself. My own tastes can be somewhat idiosyncratic and perhaps change depending on what I’ve been looking at recently or the types of work I’ve been interested in creating recently. So, in most cases, I’ve tried to be a little more objective. However, I also know I’ve been hired because of who I am and so trying to be completely objective would deny some of my own personal experiences.

There are some general decisions to be made about what aspects of photography are to be judged. Is originality to be rewarded? (and, conversely, are cliche’s to be avoided)? This may mean that some photographs, although quite impressive, might be passed by for ones that show novel composition, original subject matter or surprising use of light and form.

Other criteria would be around how judges should balance subject and moment vs composition and visual balance etc. i.e. an amazing photograph can be about the right place and the right time. It can also about the photographer having worked hard to create a stunning compositional structure with a subject matter that is usually difficult to work with.

Because our competition is about photography and the photographer, we’ll be briefing the judges to put more attention on the qualities the photographer brings to the work e.g. composition, the moment of capture (through lighting), balance, form, etc.

Categories

The use of categories in competitions is often a knee jerk reaction. Instead of paying much thought to them, the categories are chosen because ‘that’s what everyone else does’.

We’ve used categories as a way to separate and isolate types of image that have unique attributes that make them likely to be over or under-represented in the competition.

It was quite clear from having judged many previous competitions that aerial and night photography tended to be heavily represented. In particular, aerial photography shows such a ‘surprising’ view of the landscape that they tend to stand out when shown along with typical landscape views (and tend to still look ‘OK’ when over processed!).

The ability of the camera to represent the night sky in ways that we don’t tend to see with the naked eye also means that they stand out when judging competitions and hence these were separated out into a separate category.

We also wanted to ensure that intimate and abstract photographs had more of a chance of being seen and hence decide that a dedicated category for these would make sense.

We considered categories for other ‘niche’ subjects, film photography, environmental, etc. but we thought it would make more sense to have the option to recognise and draw attention to these in the final selection rather than try to separate them out.

Using scores

Many competitions ask judges to score each entrant using a variety of different scales. And from the outside looking in, it seems an apparently sensible approach. After all, you compare two images and one gets a higher score than the other, how can that go wrong? However, when you’re hours or days into a judging process, can you really remember what a score of 65 meant two days ago vs a score of 69 today? Inevitably there will be scoring ‘drift’ and then the ability to assess the comparative quality of images goes out of the window.

Scoring can still be useful though, but the judges need something simple to remember whilst doing so. I would imagine most people can only hold a simple set of scores in their head, perhaps from 0=reject, 1=maybe, 2=OK, 3= good, 4=very good to 5=possible winner.
Given a 0-5 or 1-5 scale, it would be fairly straightforward to say all of the 4s and 5s (or 3s, 4s and 5s) go through to the second - depending on how many are in each category. (See ‘pre-judging’ for more information).

There is another possible problem with scoring though. Let’s consider the fact that some images really resonate with a few judges but don’t really do much for others. What happens when we compare these with images ones that just get given a ‘very good’ by everybody. Which one should be better?

If we look at the scores, we might end up with the following (presuming four judges).

This is the resonating image:
5,5,2,2

This is the very good image:
4,4,4,4

The resonating image gets 14 points but the very good image gets 16 points so obviously the very good image does better? Well, not so fast. Art is subjective and I might prefer to see an image that really resonates with a few judges than see the generally ‘pretty good’ image. There must be something about that image and I want to know what it is - hence a scoring system needs to consider more than just the ‘average’.

Judging System

There is a reason we don’t use web-based tools to edit and post-process our photographs. They’re nearly all interminably slow, even on a fast internet connection. And try it on a flaky connection and it becomes a real pain.

Judging images is really just a form of editing and we have some great tools available for this already. I think most will be familiar with Adobe Lightroom and will agree that, when it's working OK, it’s simple to skip backwards and forward in Library mode, picking and rejecting images, giving them star rankings, reassessing, browsing through full pages of thumbnails and then having quick peeks at 100% views.

The judging process in a competition should feel the same way and we plan on distributing a local copy of the images to our judges in a Lightroom Catalog and then letting them grade and sort the images locally whereupon they can send a Lightroom Catalog back to us for further assessment.

Pre-Judging

The pre-judging of competitions is often a place where great photography gets rejected. This isn’t always true but it can sometimes seem that way when you compare the range of images that pass through to second rounds vs those that get rejected.

It used to be fairly common that pre-judging was done by either a different set of less well-known judges or sometimes by the organisers of the competition (in some cases the organisers' secretaries, PAs or interns).

When people see the almost random collection of images that get rejected or pass through to the next round, it often creates a quite visceral loss of faith in competitions.

I’ve spent quite a while considering this issue and, unfortunately, there is no ‘perfect’ answer. In an ideal world, every final round judge would look at every single entrant. However, I can guarantee that many potential judges would baulk at the idea of looking at every image in a large competition (even with significant remuneration!).

We have spent quite some time trying to come up with a compromise that on the one hand ensures that the judges get a chance to see everyone’s images but also making sure they could spend more time assessing images that stand a greater chance of making the final selections.

The way we have decided to do this is for the organisers (Alex Nail, Matt Payne, Rajesh Jyothiswaran and myself, Tim Parkin) to pre-sort all of the images using the 0-5 scoring system mentioned above. We would combine those scores and then present this pre-sorted Lightroom Catalog to the judges.

The judges can then focus most of their attention on the 3’s and 4’s while still being able to scan through the 2’s (and sanity check our 1’s) and finally seeing if they want to demote any of our 5’s.

We will brief the judges that this pre-sorting is only there to help them focus their time and not to influence their final choices. They still have all the images available to reassess and they can score any of them as they wish.

Nepotism

“But the judges will just choose one of their friends!”. It’s a fair accusation, after all, the great photographers are all friends with each other and have a desire to excluded everybody else from the industry and to share the profits between them.

Well - perhaps not. There may be a few people who are friends with each other, unsurprisingly as they tend to get invited to the same events. However, we have seen competitions where the winners have had a relationship of some sort with one or more of one of the commended or winners and so we have introduced a voluntary scheme where if a person recognises the photograph and has a relationship with the person in some way, they should recuse themselves from judging. This should only be an issue if they are related or close friends or have a business relationship (if a photographer is just regular workshop client, this should not be a problem but we will ask the judges to make us aware of this).

In Person vs Remote Judging

There is a lot to be said for remote judging. It makes the best use of time for all involved. It can spread the load across multiple days, allowing judges to take rests when they’re feeling a bit jaded or can’t concentrate appropriately. It also gives the judges a bit of flexibility when they can do the judging. However, there is so much to be said for discussing things in person. If you’ve ever sat and chatted about a book with a friend, you’ll know that each of you brings different knowledge to the conversation and the combined assessment is more than just the average of two different opinions.

I’m heavily influenced by my experiences with the wildlife photographer of the year awards where the final rounds are judged in person over a series of days. The resulting conversations are fascinating and each judge may have specialist or local knowledge that the others don’t have. The group often adapts its position on certain photos based on this information.

We would like for our judges to be able to meet in person for a few days for our awards but with our judges donating their time and with restrictions around Covid, we have compromised on a final day of judging in person after the sifting has been done remotely, to ensure that we have agreement on our winning and commended images.

Managing a Group of Judges

Well, it’s not quite as bad as herding cats, but managing a set of independent, professional photographers should not be underestimated. Some may be quite outspoken, others may be quiet and withdrawn. Left to their own devices it would be possible if perhaps not likely, that the discussion, and hence the conclusions, could be over-influenced by one or more members of the group.

A good chairperson can mitigate most of these issues. They can keep the judging on a timetable, ensure each person’s voice is heard, prompt/remind judges of the criteria they are judging by, etc. The chairperson shouldn’t be making or influencing decisions but should be able to ensure things proceed along a timely and appropriate path.

And that's about it for my thoughts on judging. I think it pays to be as open as possible about your processes rather than have a 'black box' approach and if you have any suggestions for things I may have missed, which aren't clear or just general questions about the competition, please let me know in the comments below. 

Many of you will already know or will have heard of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce which is often cited as one of the greatest satirical works of American literature. Bierce was an American writer and soldier and his satirical dictionary started life as a newspaper column, with the first definition appearing in 1867. The first column with The Devil’s Dictionary as title appeared in The Wasp in 1881¹. The first entry in that column has a particular resonance today (ACCURACY, n. A certain uninteresting quality carefully excluded from human statements).

Ambrose Bierce around 1866²

The Dictionary first appeared in book form as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906, with 521 definitions but only for the letters A to L. The full work was published as volume 7 in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce with his original title of The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911. Many of the definitions are enriched by citations and poems credited to different authors with wonderfully exotic names, all of them made up by Bierce. There have been numerous editions of the dictionary as a stand-alone volume since (including a fine Folio Editions volume with illustrations by Peter Forster)³. There have also been numerous translations and imitations⁴.

Just a few of my favourite Bierce definitions are

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

ADMIRAL, n. That part of a war-ship which does the talking while the figure-head does the thinking.

APPETITE, n. An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labour question.

BIGOT, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

DAY, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper—the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort. These two kinds of social activity overlap.

DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.

DISTANCE, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.

EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

And so on all the way to Z and (remembering that this was written at the end of the 19th Century) …

ZEUS, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.

As is readily evident and by way of warning, Bierce was in no way politically correct and some of his definitions have not worn that well with time, including that for the photograph.

PHOTOGRAPH, n. A picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. It is a little better than the work of an Apache, but not quite as good as that of a Cheyenne.

That is the only mention of photography in The Devil’s Dictionary but clearly this is a subject area ripe for some clarifying definitions. I offer the following as a starting point⁵.

3-D pop [n]: The sickening noise made as the lens you were changing hits the ground.

45 [n]: Denotation used for some large format cameras and film. ALMOST the answer to life, the universe and everything for some photographers, but a little too big as not all the lenses they would like to use have sufficient coverage.

AA [n]: Help for monochrome photographers addicted to large format cameras, dark red filters and the smell of fixer.

Aberration [n]: What’s left of an image after the removal of distracting elements and sky replacement in Luminar or Photoshop.

APSC [n]: Acute Personality Split Camera; cannot decide whether to look down on all smaller formats of sensor or feel inferior to those with full frame sensors (see Full Frame)

Back-up [n]: An activity that you always intended to do before your PC failed (see Second Back-up).

Big Stopper [n]: A form of arrested development in photographic technique involving elimination of most detail.

Blue hour [n]: The period of swearing after finding that some essential element of gear has been left in the car several kilometres away.

Bokeh [n]: A result of using expensive lenses wide open to distract from an uninteresting main subject in an image (see also Swirly Bokeh).

Park bench with bokeh reflections, Dalton Square, Lancaster

Border [n]: The black lines added to a print to suggest that the image has not been cropped to cut out the unwanted elements included by poor framing (see Crop).

B-roll [n]: Video photographers’ name for a bacon butty.

Bulb setting [n]: mostly about 10cm deep and 10 cm apart.

Camera Club [n]: An embarrassment of judges very willing to criticise your latest work and give extensive and conflicting advice (see Judge).

Camera Collector [n]: A means of rapidly increasing prices on EBay after spreading rumours about the special character of a lens or the shutter sound of a vintage film camera (see Vintage, Rumours, Swirly Bokeh).

Camera shake [n]: Condition causing blurred images particularly common amongst the very young and very old (see ICM).

Chimping [n]: The sounds of disappointment made by photographers when reviewing their shots in camera.

Chromatic Aberration [n]: An aberration with additional drastic changes to white balance and colour wheels (see Aberration and Haze).

Circle of confusion [n]: Not really a circle (see Exposure Triangle).

Cloud [n]: (a) More than a cloud (see Equivalents); (b) A grey smear on an image taken with a Big Stopper; (c) (as in “The Cloud”) digital storage accounting for 2.5% of global carbon emissions and globally equivalent to 1.5 times total UK electricity consumption. Mostly used for storing selfies and images of cats, meals, and coffee mousse.

More than a cloud: view north from La Berra, Switzerland

Coffee [n]: The ultimate film developer for hipsters, but requiring remarkable will-power to waste good coffee in such a way.

Composite image [n]: Technique of combining images dating back to the 19th Century and STILL not made illegal.

Covid [n]: A global pandemic disaster resulting in the sad loss of some excellent photographers, cancellation of nearly all workshops, postponement of the On Landscape Meeting of Minds, and far fewer airplane contrails to remove in Photoshop.

Crop [n]: The plentiful harvest of wasted paper after a print session.

Cyanotype [n]: Digital print made before realising that the other print cartridges were empty.

Dark Room [n]: A place of torture where photographers are sent to spend hours trying to produce the print they envisaged in taking the picture (see Digital Darkroom, Print).

Decisive Moment [n]: The best image selected from a contact sheet or (more recently) from a series of images taken in burst mode.

Daguerreotype [n]: an alternative photographic process of producing almost invisible images on metal plates; not to be confused with …

Deguerreotype [n]: A type of war of words between the English and French as to who invented proper photography.

Depth of Field [n]: The number of comments after a camera review in DPReviews.

Diffraction [n]: An on-line argument between supporters of 2 camera brands that becomes more intense as the differences between the cameras become smaller.

Digital Darkroom [n]: A form of torture resulting from software that has far too many controls and options producing prints that still do not match what is on screen even after buying expensive calibration tools (see Print).

Drone [n]: A really REALLY annoying noise coming from above, increasingly found in the most peaceful landscape locations.

Electronic shutter [n]: (pre-2005 cameras) a disaster waiting to happen to your outrageously expensive film camera (see Xpan); (post-2015 cameras) a way of introducing uncontrolled blur into images of moving subjects.

Equivalents [n]: Concept introduced by Alfred Stieglitz to justify taking 350 ambiguous images of clouds. More recently applied to stacks of bricks in the Tate Gallery and the emotions conveyed by images of mousse on cups of coffee (see Redundant).

Cloud as Equivalent – Flühli, Switzerland

Essence [n]: A characteristic of Edward Weston’s photographs of rocks. Analogous to Schrödinger’s Cat in that it provides an excellent excuse for endless discussions about whether it is there or not.⁶

To be a rock
or more than a rock
that is the question:
Whether it is nobler to
attract the photographer’s gaze
or suffer the indignity of
being overlooked as
just a rock; left to sleep
but perchance to dream of
fame on a gallery wall.
Or, is it enough
to just exist and
be left in peace to lie.

Essence of a rock: perchance to dream or just to lie? Långholmen Sweden

Exc+++++ [a]: Camera on EBay with just a few patches of leatherette missing and a few points of corrosion on the body (see Minty).

Exposure compensation [n]: Model fees depending on degree of undress.

Exposure to the Right [n]: Street photography to preserve the highlights of the American Presidential Election. May leave some murky shadow areas.

Exposure triangle [n]: A concept designed to create a circle of confusion when a photographer is brave enough to switch from Auto mode.

F64 Group [n]: A group of early 20^th Century American photographers who succeeded in elevating cabbage into Art.

Film [n]: A support for images for which the colours were always a bit disappointing when the prints came back from Boots.

Colours from Film: Wild Boar Fell, Mallerstang, Cumbria

Film Simulations [n]: A digital means of reproducing the disappointing colours of various types of film.

Filter [n]: A means of adding defects to a perfectly good lens.

Flektogon [n]: An old Zeiss lens design that has recently become much more expensive because of its pretty zebra camouflage. Mostly used for collecting dust (see Camera Collector).

Fn Button [n]: Unlabelled camera function control. Impossible to remember what function it controls and often seems to produce a different result each time it is pressed.

Focus stacking [n]: A technique for spending even more time in front of a computer that could be spent taking images (see HDR).

Full Frame [n]: A sensor with an inflated self-perception of superiority that is hardly justified when still 4 times smaller than 6x6 and 60 times smaller than 10x8.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) [n]: A condition common among photographers which results in spending all available hours reading reviews of cameras, lenses and all possible types of accessories on the internet. Appears to have been particularly contagious during 2020 lockdown (see Gear Head, Rumours).

There once was a gear head from York
Who was really a bit of a dork.
His GAS was so bad
He felt that he had
To declare himself NSFW.

Gear head [n]: A photographer infected with GAS; not to be confused with …

Geared Head [n]: My tripod supports something MUCH more expensive than yours.

Genesis [n]: The origins of the world and landscape photography. Somewhat after let there be really nice light and before the arrival of any colour.

Golden hour [n]: The period before sunset during which 95% of landscape photos entered into competitions are taken.

Golden Hour: Pendragon Castle, Mallerstang, Cumbria

Graffiti [n]: A subject for monochrome images made famous by Brassai. More recently used to add elements of colour to street photography (but the painting takes much longer than the photo and may be illegal).

Grandagon [n]: Rodenstock lens for the more mature photographer.

When I grow old,
I will wear a photographer’s vest
and a fisherman’s hat,
and grow a beard,
and go large format.
With tripod and dark cloth,
and black and white film,
with standing development,
without agitation,
for the tone and textures,
of classic prints.
Though the pack is so heavy
to lift from the floor
and the tripod weighs something
like lead,
And scanning the negs is
a real pain in the A.
Perhaps I’ll go Leica
instead.

Hasselblad [n]: 哈苏

Haze [n]: The result of a global disaster of drought and fires in California, Oregon, Washington, Siberia, Paraguay and Brazil in 2020. No longer easily removed using the Clarity slider, but easily turned orange to impress.

Haze near Flühli, Switzerland after arrival of smoke from California, September 2020 (after post-processing, see also Pre-Visualisation and Chromatic Aberration)

HDR [n]: Another technique for spending even more time in front of a computer that could be spent taking images (see Focus Stacking, ND Grad).

Histogram [n]: An option for obscuring the composition of an image in an electronic viewfinder.

Horizon [n]: As far as the eye can see during lockdown. Should not be placed right in the centre of the frame unless you are already famous. Probably best not placed vertically unless you are really very famous.

Hyperfocal distance [n]: Manic use of manual focus to check social distancing in post-Covid workshop groups.

Insurance [n]: That which you had the intention of buying before watching your tripod, camera and favourite lens topple slowly into a river (yes, it does happen).

Intentional camera movement (ICM) [n]: Post-hoc justification of a blurred image (see Camera Shake).

Image stabilisation [n]: A method of using extremely sophisticated mechanics and electronics to replace a simple camera support with 3 legs (see Tripod).

Jökulsárlón [n]: An unusual effect of the earth’s magnetic field in Iceland causing a particularly strong attractor of photographic workshop groups.

Judge [n]: (photographic) A person who has no idea what they are talking about.

Large Format [a]: Photographer with body mass index greater than 30.

Lens hoodie [n]: Required dress for street photography.

Long Exposure [n]: Sunburn consequent to having to wait for the Golden Hour.

Manual [n]: A guide to camera controls that has become increasingly incomprehensible with time. A small pamphlet of 8 pages in the age of film, now a book of hundreds of pages that requires buying an additional book of explanation (see Menu Option).

Megapixies [n pl.]: Source of the magic hidden in digital sensors, continually increased as a marketing ploy by camera companies. Can sometimes be detected as pixie dust at higher ISOs.

Menu Option [n]: A camera control that is impossible to find when you need it.

Metaphor [n]: A means by which photographers can encourage the viewer to take a closer look at an image by pretending there is a deeper meaning.⁷

Remains of ancient melèze above Prarions, Switzerland –
There must be a metaphor in there somewhere

Minimalism [n]: A fall-back when you really cannot find anything interesting to photograph.

Minimalism;
Already five syllables
Used in a haiku

Minimalism: Lac de Joux, Switzerland

Minty [a]: Camera on EBay with leatherette just starting to curl at the edges and a cloudy viewfinder.

Moi-ré [a]: A photographer who thinks it is all about him and his gear.

ND Grad [n]: A way to avoid spending too much time in front of the computer (see Filter, HDR).

Noise reduction [n]: Expensive high-tech headphones for use while waiting for some better light (see Golden Hour, Long Exposure).

Nude [n]: (a) A technique for ruining a perfectly good landscape photograph by adding an incongruous element (as in images by Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, Jean-Loup Sieff); (b) landscape photography for studio photographers (see Exposure Compensation).

Original [a]: Art speak, as in “deeply original”; meaningless when applied to photographs.

Over-exposed [a]: Completely unclothed (see Exposure Compensation, Nude)

Petzval [n]: A 19th Century lens of simple design; revived in the 21st Century as an expensive way of getting blurry photos (or “velvety watercolour bokeh”) [see Bokeh].

Photography blogs [n]: On-line discussions of expensive hi-fi equipment, diet books, dogs, and existentialism.

Photoshop [n]: Digital dark room, complete with sink (of funds from a large number of photographers on a monthly basis) (see Digital Darkroom).

Physics [n]: (as in constrained by the laws of physics). Marketing ploy to justify the production of lenses that are ridiculously large and more and more expensive. Often cited in reviews of said lenses (see also Render).

Pictorialism [n]: Creating photographic Art by introducing blur and deep shadows. Now available as 2576 style files for less than $30⁸.

Pinhole [n]: (a) a really annoying source of light leakage (but see Vintage); (b) an effective practical demonstration of the blurring effect of the physics of diffraction

Platinum Print [n]: A photograph that has sold a million copies (does not apply to single Andreas Gursky or Peter Lik photographs selling for more than a million pounds/euros/dollars).

Portfolio [n]: A collection of prints put together for other photographers to laugh at.

Powered by AI [a]: Changes decided by a computer that understands only 0s and 1s.

Pre-visualisation [n]: A justification of the use of extreme post-processing to rescue a poor image into something more acceptable.

Print [n]: A hard copy image, 99.5% of which are not quite right.

RAW [a]: files that are ripe for post-processing; should preferably not be over-cooked.

Reality [n]: philosophical concept; meaningless when applied to photographs

Redundant [a]: Another photograph of storm clouds clearing over Yosemite Falls from New Inspiration Point (or midday sun beams in Antelope Canyon, or sun rise at Mesa Arch, or sunset at Horsetail Falls, or the Wave at Coyote Buttes, or…. [add to personal taste])⁹.

Another redundant photograph: The Wave at Coyote Buttes, Arizona

Render [v]: (as in renders beautifully, 3D render) A marketing quality of a lens used to justify a very high price. Often cited in reviews of said lenses.

Resolution [n]: A marketing quality of a sensor that allows the photographer to produce prints that are far larger than they can ever afford to print and which is destroyed when the image is posted to Instagram.

Rule of Thirds [n]: A classification of images taken with a vintage rangefinder – one third out of focus (rangefinder alignment); one third over exposed (shutter running a bit slow); and one third taken with the lens cap inadvertently left on (see Vintage).

Rumours [n pl.]: (as in Canonrumours, Sonyrumours, Fujirumours, Nikonrumours, Leicarumours) an effective way of keeping gear heads occupied in between purchases of new cameras and lenses (see Gear Head).

Safe Light [n]: Safe light (see Golden Hour)

Saturation [n]: (as in over-saturation) A surfeit of Instagram sunsets.

Selfie [n]: A technique for ruining a perfectly good landscape photograph by putting a face (or faces) in front of it.

Second back-up [n]: An activity that you always intended to do before your networked hard disk failed.

Slow photography [n]: A project limited to one camera, one lens, one image per year and lots of Zen.

Pause a while and observe
The landscape and the light.
Pause a while and memorise
The play of wind and clouds.
Return again and pause to reflect
On the changes from before.
Finally, mount the camera,
Focus, tilt and shift,
Choose aperture and shutter speed,
Ready for the decisive moment.
Apart from the damn film holders,
Which were somehow left at home.
Pause a while and experience
The wondrous joy of Zen
In the Art of Slow Photography

Special edition [n]: It costs HOW MUCH???????

Sublime [a]: A way of increasing the appreciation of beauty in the landscape by looking through thousands of images on Flickr very very rapidly.

Subsidy [n]: List price contribution made by retired dentists and lawyers in support of Leica¹⁰.

Sunny 16 [n]: Method of perversely estimating exposure based on symbols printed inside an old Kodak film box rather than using a phone app.

Swirly Bokeh [n]: A result of using cheap Eastern European lenses wide open to distract from an uninteresting main subject in an image (see Bokeh, Petzval).

Tethered [a]: as in images by Nobuyoshi Araki; (see Zone System, extended)

Tilt/shift lens [n]: A very large lens for making people and cars look very very small.

Time Capsule [n]: A back-up that you always intended to do before your Mac failed (yes, it does happen) (see Second back-up).

Time Lapse [n]: The delay between exposing a film and getting it developed some months later (or not at all in the case of Garry Winogrand).

Tonal Gradation [n]: Fifty shades of grey. A much-valued property of monochrome film in nude photography (apparently) (see Over-exposed, Zone System).

Tripod [n]: A device used for manual image stabilisation, most likely to fail when close to water (see Insurance; Warranty).

Vignette [n]: That part of the animal remaining in the frame in a wildlife photo.

Red Squirrel Vignette; Mallerstang, Cumbria

Vintage [a]: Camera or lens for hipster photographers embracing lens flare and light leaks as a way of being Arty.

Vintage Zeiss Super Ikonta 531/16: Glacial Erratic, Mallerstang, Cumbria

Vlog [n]: Overlong video, mostly of opening boxes of new gear and photos of brick walls (see Gear Head).

Warranty [n]: A guarantee from the manufacturer that any benefits will expire from 1 to 10 days before the photographer has a malfunction or breakage.

Watermarked [n]: Inside of a lens after being retrieved from the river (see Insurance and Tripod).

Weather resistant [a]: Marketing speak for really REALLY not waterproof (see also Warranty and Watermarked).

White Balance [n]: An index of integration as the inverse percentage of white male ambassadors for each camera brand.

Workshop [n]: (photographic) (a) until recently, one of the few remaining ways to make some money for professional photographers (see Covid); (b) a successful way of dispersing original ideas to other photographers to ensure that all originality disappears.

Xpan [n]: A 35mm film Hasselblad made by Fuji that now costs more than when it was new (see Camera Collector); bought for future use as a paperweight (see Electronic Shutter).

Xtrans [n]: An alternative digital sensor; popular among gender fluid photographers.

Zeiss [n]: The god of optics in ancient mythology.

Zeiss, the God of Optics, represented in the form of a stereo camera (optics lost to ravages of time, unfortunately).

Zero-D [a]: An ultra-wide lens that only really rarely travels any distance from the shelf.

Zone System [n]: Concept for controlling monochrome exposures: originally 10 shades of grey (but which can be expanded to 50 for some improper purposes – see Tonal Gradation, Tethered, Over-exposed).

To finish with one last definition from Ambrose Bierce himself:

NONSENSE, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.¹¹

References

1 For a more complete history see the article on the Devil’s Dictionary in Wikipedia
2 From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Bierce
3 A full text of the Devil’s Dictionary can be found on-line as part of the Gutenberg Project
4 For a list see the Wikipedia article in footnote 1.
5 But after writing the list of definitions presented here I thought I had better check if it had been done before for photography. Indeed it has, by Roger Cicala the founder of Lens Rentals and by Jffield. Both have some really good definitions, but thankfully without too much overlap with the list above.
6 With apologies to Guy Tal, More than a Rock, Rocky Nook, 2013
7 With apologies to Joe Cornish in On Landscape Issue 216
8 With apologies to Andrew Sanderson in On Landscape Issue 218
9 See On Landscape "Landscape and the Philosophers of Photography"
10 With apologies to all retired dentists and lawyers who might have invested in Leica gear.
11 And apologies to anyone else who might have been offended at my wilful misuse of photographic terms.