master photography…

Report and photographs by Richard Kilpatrick

Following the success of last year’s Judges’ training day, June 2010 saw the Coventry Hilton Hotel again playing host to a panel of MPA Fellows eager to hone the skills of members ‘rising through the ranks’ and assist the qualifications and awards processes. Introduced once again by Eric Jenkins, compared to the inaugural event the programme was very focused on refining the process of judging and the criteria on which images are assessed.

With a much faster introduction, few changes have been made to this year’s requirements for Awards, and only minor changes to the Qualifications – excellence is excellence, after all – and the Qualifications process was addressed in detail by Kevin Wilson prior to the Awards process. At the second training day members were able to give a little more feedback, both on their own qualifications experiences and on the process in general.

Dennis Hylander delivers one of his famous critiques

For MPA members looking to submit panels or images, the crucial thing is as ever to consider the entire panel as a whole. Mentors and judges alike are looking for very similar things, with many years of accumulated experience throughout the MPA’s history contributing to a detailed, consistent and fair assessment. Your mentor’s advice is valuable and combines with content such as this in the magazine to hopefully guide you to success; coming straight from the Judging committee you ignore this sort of information at your peril!

Most importantly, your panel as a whole can be affected by one or two flawed images as Kevin demonstrated with a rejected submission – later revealed to be from one of the judges who successfully qualified with a different panel. Even at this stage, the feedback and comments about the images were consistent, and agreement was reached very quickly.

Using your mentor is key to improving your scores in this process. Submit raw images (not raw files, but uncropped, unretouched prints) to give them a true impression of your capabilities as a photographer and remember, the advice you get about post-production will benefit from this. You’re not being judged at this stage, you’re being assessed for the best information and advice to go forwards.

Kevin Wilson engages an attentive Ewen Forsyth

This year the submissions process for Qualifications has been slightly revised, with profiles and portfolios being sent directly to the MPA and the workbooks being forwarded to the judges in advance. Working on your print quality requires at the very least attention to the finished results as much as the final image; Lisa Visser’s Fellowship panel went through several stages before she was happy, as she explained to the delegates.

“When I decided to do the Fellowship, my mentor told me I was ready to do it – I thought I was really rubbish, I wasn’t well in the awards. Being told that one picture was Fellowship standard was encouragement to just go with it, I felt I could run with it and focused on doing that.

“To create the panel, I had about four images that matched the requirements – the rest were produced between April and July; the images were reprinted, testing different papers, nothing was going to go that wasn’t perfect”.

The standards for assessing the images remain with lighting measured with an exposure meter to be 1 second @ ISO 100 and f/16.