How to Win Photo Contests
Ruin, San Diego, California, 28 July 1996. This image has won first prize in every contest in which it's been entered. I shot it with my Linhof Technika IV camera and my Schneider 65mm f/8 Super Angulon with a Tiffen Grad-ND 0.9 P-series filter on Fuji Velvia 4x5" film. The natural falloff of this ultrawide lens and the graduated filter on the top of the lens makes the wall appear to glow. The bold red diamond in the center stands out vividly from the blue background, making for a strong basic composition.
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Introduction
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I've won loads of photo contests, so many in fact that it wasn't fun anymore when I won first or grand prize in just about every contest I entered. I even won a trip to Hawaii for one photo. Oddly enough I am the world's winningest photographic artist, having won first place in about 88% of every major competition I've entered. I was also lucky; art is art and every contest has different judges looking for different things.
Winning contests is easy. It's not so much how good you are or what you do, it's what you don't do!
Simplicity is the key to composition, as well as the key to winning photo contests. Simple images that say what they're trying to say clearly, directly and without any distractions win. Most of the photos people show me have distracting elements. Images without distractions win. The less that's in your picture, the stronger it is. As Ansel Adams taught, while painting is an art of inclusion (you have to paint everything in otherwise it's not in the picture), photography is an art of exclusion: you need to prune everything from your image that isn't contributing to make the image as strong as possible.
Like everything in life, your photo needs to stand out and be memorable. It needs to say something, and say it as clearly and boldly as possible.
This all became even clearer to me when I was asked to judge a winner for this 1X Photo Contest.
It was easy for me. There were about 1,500 entries, and all I had to do was pick one. Like the best photo contests, this was art. There were no points or grading system; it was simply for me to pick which was the best picture.
I looked at 1,500 images, and picked the best based on which was the boldest, cleanest, simplest image that showed me something interesting in a novel and/or memorable way.
This sounds easy, but while all of the 1,500 images were really good, very few images met all of these simple requirements, and then among those that did, the image needed to stand out at least a day later, and out of 1,500 images, only one did that.
This is why simplicity is so important. Most images are way too busy with distracting elements and/or look like everyone else's images. An image needs to be simple and it needs to be different, as well as being a strong image, to stand out. An image of the Milky Way behind Delicate Arch is a cliché: it doesn't stand out if you already know what the picture looks like from me just mentioning it.
This is a contest, and like almost everything in the free world, is a competition in which we have winners and we have losers. In this case we had 1,500 great images, of which 1,400 would lose, a few would win by other judges and only one that I'd pick. Like the real world, this is a tough competition.
When I judge I look for images that:
Stand out from the crowd
Catch my eye from a distance, or in this case, catch my eye as a thumbnail among 1,500 others. This means the image has strong composition, also called strong fundamentals. If it's boring as a thumbnail, it never gets better when seen bigger.
Most people have no idea that the most difficult part of winning any modern photo contest with digitally submitted images is that the people culling through them aren't going to look at them full-screen, and even if they do, they'll be looking at them for less than a fraction of a second. Just like life, your image needs to scream PICK ME! when seen as a tiny thumbnail on the same page as everyone else. If your image isn't strong enough to stand out on a page with 1,500 other images, it won't ever be seen again in the judging because It won't be picked for further consideration.
To judge this contest I was directed to a web page with all 1,500 images shown as thumbnails 4-across on a very, very, very tall page. How tall was it? About 100 feet (30 meters) tall through which I had to scroll to see all the images!
I started off trying to look carefully, but with 100 vertical feet of web page through which to scroll, I had to speed it up.
I have 1,500 images flying past me; an image has to stand out as a thumbnail to go any further. It's the same in life or anywhere else images are displayed; today we are all deluged by so many images that a good image has to stand out from the others, or be forgotten in less than a second.
If an image has a strong fundamental composition like my image at the top, you "get it" even as a thumbnail. Most images have no fundamental composition that can be seen as small as a thumbnail; those images are boring and don't often win contests or get selected by clients. You can enlarge them trying to look for something, but in the real world, no one but your parents has the time for such charity.
If it doesn't catch someone's eye as a thumbnail, the image goes no farther.
If you're submitting real, tangible works of art to an in-person jury your piece may, or may not, have the luxury of more than a fraction of a second of the judge's attention. In the case of an in-person jury viewing tangible works you may have the luxury of submitting a more subtle image, but in digital photography and any contest with digital submissions, the world is so deluged with images that you have to stand out even as a thumbnail. Let's face it: most people never get off Facebook where every image is only seen tiny and for a fraction of a second as people scroll around. If you want to get someone to pause even for a whole second, your image has to catch their eye in the first tenth of a second. Subtle images aren't for digital contests. An image can be quiet, but if we have to guess what it is, it's history.
Another tip is not to show work in your camera's native aspect ratio. Shoot however you want, but crop your final image into the shape that shows your point most strongly — which is almost never 3:2. As I'm going through the thumbnails, images in 3:2 (typical for most DSLRs) usually have the central subject squashed inside a bigger empty rectangle, and it also shows me the artist probably didn't give much thought to his piece if he's showing it in the same shape the camera shot it. Ansel Adams and every other great photographer has always cropped their pictures into whatever shape makes them the strongest. Most 35mm, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras shoot in a too-wide and too-short 1.5:1 (a.k.a. 3:2) shape where the subject sits in the middle and there's not much on the sides. It's even worse with vertical shots. Crop your images closer to a square to make the subject or main point fill the frame as much as possible. Especially when you're being judged electronically as thumbnails, you need to make every pixel count.
As you crop-in, the percentage of subject grows and the percentage of fluff recedes. Your image becomes stronger because it's got more content and less fluff. When resized to the same thumbnail, screen or print size as everything else, you just made your subject much bigger. Always crop-out everything that's not helping.
Show me something new
If it stands out as a thumbnail, it also needs to show me something new or interesting, even as a thumbnail.
Selecting among 1,500 images on the same huge web page means an image had to stand out as both strong and interesting in less than a tenth of a second as I scanned them all. Regardless of how any contest is run, the human mind can only digest so much when trying to ingest 1,500 images. It's the artist's job to make his image say what it has to say instantly and strongly; the viewer never has the luxury of time. This is a difference between artists and regular people: the artist creates his images consciously to make instant sense, while the general public just takes pictures and expects the viewers to figure it out. Like most forms of communication, it is the creator's job to ensure that the piece makes sense and almost never the viewer's job to have to figure it out.
99% of the 1,500 images were great, but didn't show me anything new, so they never got past this stage. I flicked past them like everyone else and they were gone. They weren't even forgotten since they didn't have the time to enter my consciousness. With all these pictures and only so many hours available to review them, that wasn't happening.
If it's star trails behind a stone arch, it's a cliché and uninteresting: I've seen the same things a zillion times before.
It needs to show me something new even as a thumbnail; I won't bother to enlarge it if the thumbnail doesn't show me what it is. When picking among 1,500 images I don't have the luxury of being curious; your image needs to say its piece and grab me as a thumbnail.
It's got to make me want to see it closer, and not make me say “I've seen that before, who cares?” Of course a common subject shown differently can be interesting, but the trap into which too many fall is to try to imitate a style or a famous image they've seen before. Copies never excite or stand out unless they do something novel; you have to drill your own hole. What makes it unique can't be subtle in a digital contest; it has to be obvious in the thumbnail.
Our subconscious mind is responsible for about half of our perception of art. Our subconscious pays as much attention to negative space (the blank space around the conscious subject) as it does to positive space (the intended subject). Our brains work this way for our survival; we see and act on what we see in fractions of a second to save us from wild animals attacking, pianos falling from the sky or cars driving off the road by people distracted by important phone calls. We have to act instantly without conscious deliberation, and that still drives much of our visual perception.
After looking for images that both caught my eye and showed me something new (or something old in a new way), it left only 15 thumbnails that looked interesting enough to investigate more closely. Not that the other 1,485 images were bad, just that they didn't stand out enough for me to have the luxury of examining them further.
Have no distractions
Now that I've picked 1% of the images for further examination, an image has to hold up when examined closely. Here's where even small distractions made images get dropped. A great image has no distractions. A winning image doesn't have dirt spots or stray junk to distract us; it's clean and pure and stays strong when enlarged. If the artist didn't care enough to clean up his image, why should I care about it either? I'm picking only one very best image, so any imperfection gets an image thrown out. I've been using Photoshop for at least 25 years and it's always been able to repair spots and minor distractions. Even optically-printed images have had the tools to retouch them for over 150 years! Please spot your images before submitting them.
You need to look at every square millimeter of your image and own it. You are the artist and you alone are responsible for everything about your work. Especially competing at such a high level, there is no room for anything out of place.
Always be sure to remove every distraction from all of your images. There were other beautiful images that got dropped because there was one tiny spot that was out of place.
You also should understand that judging is never done, and should not be done, at high resolution. There was a great, simple image of a dark bare tree against the snow. It could have won, but there was one tiny bird on the tree. The bird was too small to be a compositional element, so it was a distraction. Be cognizant of the scale at which your images will be seen. If that tree image was shot on large format and printed at 2 x 3 meters (6 x 9 feet) on a gallery wall the bird would have been a great touch since it would be a bird and a bit of an Easter egg for people who find it, but as seen online, even when I looked at the bigger images, it was too small to be seen as anything other than a blob. Instead of an Easter egg giving us a bird to explore with our eyes, it just called out the fact that at 1,000 pixels wide or less all we could see is a blob!
Sadly many images were also just not that sharp. The usual problems of camera or subject motion made them unsharp, even at these web sizes. That was sad; they could also have been great images, but when I'm picking but one image to win, they got dropped. Likewise for imperfect exposure. It's easy enough to correct on an iPhone in the free Snapseed app, so again I couldn't pass on any images that distracted me because they were too dark or too light and took my mind off whatever the photo had to say.
At this stage I also had three other great images in a pool of four finalists from which I'd pick the ultimate winner.
How do I choose now? All three of these caught my eye as a thumbnail, show me something interesting and have no distractions. Only four out of 1,500 otherwise great images made it this far, so how now do I choose the best of the best among these four superb photos picked from 1,500 really good ones?
Have staying power
I slept on it. The last part is that an image has to have more than just Wow!
Great art is timeless and sticks in our imaginations. Music is art and great music stays playing in our minds forever. While catchy advertisements may have jingles we can't clear from our ears for a day, great art stays with us for a lifetime.
In art we have to 1.) catch the eye, and then 2.) not let it go, ever. These great images, like many, are great eye catchers and have plenty to explore, but it's too easy to see all there is. The greatest art has us coming back again and again and shows us new things every time. Catching the eye is 99% of it, and keeping the eye interested is the last 1%.
I was done judging for the day with two top picks. I would sleep on these two images and hope the stronger image would stand out in my memory tomorrow. Whichever had more staying power and impact in my memory the next day would win.
The Winner
The next morning, one image was chosen as the obvious winner.
The next morning my memory of one of them was already fading, while the other popped out in my memory. Because that one met all the criteria of being simple, without distraction, shows me something I've never seen before and it was burnt most strongly in my memory, it wins.
The image stood out the instant I saw it as a thumbnail because the subjects were light and warm and popped out from the cool and dark background. Even the thumbnail was three-dimensional.
Because it's more square, it also stood out more from too many other images left in the same skinny rectangular shape in which most cameras shoot. Too few people bothered to crop their images to make them stronger, and instead simply left what could have been good pictures floating around inside larger image frames. Many pictures had strong central cores - surrounded on both sides by essentially blank space. When cropped square, images grow as seen in most browsers, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Images left in the native 3:2 aspect ratio of most cameras told me the shooter probably wasn't taking his image very seriously.
The winner stood out because of the colors and tones are done right (warm gets closer and cool recedes). It has no technical distractions - nothing distracts technically or artistically. Also very important it's something I haven't seen before. It looks simple and trivial, but I've never seen a girl hugging a fox in the woods — and the fox look like he's enjoying it! It's brilliant. I've seen thousands of sunset photos and photos that look like other contest winners — but it's all things we've all seen before. It may seem simple because it is: I've never seen a shot like this, it stands out and has no distractions.
It's a bold, clean, simple image that shows me something I've never seen before and stays in my memory with time. Simple, but none of the other great 1,499 images did this, so Bingo!, this great image is my choice as winner.
Summary
To win an online or digital photo contest:
1.) Be sure your images are strong enough to stand out as thumbnails. Subtlety usually doesn't work for digital contests. The most difficult hurdle is to get your image picked from the rest at the thumbnail stage. You've got to catch a judge's eye in less than a tenth of a second in a digital contest. Select your images at thumbnail size.
2.) Show me something I've never seen before — but be sure it's something beautiful that I want to see. This is art, not journalism; don't show me the world's problems. Show me something new, catchy, interesting, simple and novel. Astonish me.
3.) Have other people help you pick them, because you see your own images with too much knowledge of what they are. Judges have no idea what your pictures are, so strangers will do a better job of picking contest entries the way judges will see them.
4.) Refine your images:
Be sure they are only in color if color adds to the picture's message.
Crop them as tightly as you can.
Remove any and all distractions and imperfections that don't contribute directly to your image.
If showing people or models, be just as picky to find absolutely perfect subjects. As Peter Gowland said, you probably can't just use your girlfriend as not everyone will see her in the same positive light you do. You need to use top-level talent so that any appearance imperfections don't distract, either. What makes top models top models isn't that they are more beautiful than others, it's because they know how to pose and that their features are symmetrical and their skin is free from blemishes that have to be retouched.
Be sure it's as sharp as it's supposed to be when seen at the size the judges will be seeing it. Even a 3MP camera has more than enough resolution for anything, but if you have any distracting blur, choose a different image.
Make no excuses. If an image isn't tops, fix it or don't submit it.
5.) Follow all submission rules, timelines and technical requirements exactly.
Conclusion
Don't spend too much time agonizing over selections; this is art and everyone's tastes vary. No image will win every contest. Have fun!
Here are this and the other winners as picked by other judges.
© Ken Rockwell. All rights reserved. Tous droits réservés. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Eftertryck förbjudes.
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