One of last year's Category Winners.

The other main highlight of PMA 2008 was watching the judging of the 2008 AIPP Canon APPA (Australian Profesional Photography Awards). Firstly, I went to the AIPP stand and acquainted myself with the book from last years awards – and found 2 of my own pictures on page 84 (yay!). Then having got a feeling for the level of Silver, Silver with Distinction and Gold, I went to watch some of the judging.

It was fascinating, if for nothing else, just for the organisational structure. I’m not sure how many entries there are but I am pretty sure it is up around 10,000. In any case, it’s a lot of images to judge in a few days. Nonetheless, not having seen any photographic judging at this level before, I was somewhat surprised initially at how little time they devoted to each image. 5 up to possibly 20 seconds looking before they scored it. Only if there was a +/- 10 point dispute, did they have a discussion at all. If it was awarded one? point under award level (say 84 points and 85 is Silver) then it went to re-judging in another room.

So it was helter skelter and very subjective. There were often very large divergence in the points given, and these ended with at least an interesting discussion (sometimes) and a bit more of a look and a remarking. There was a huge range of quality on display, from the slightly ridiculous (OK, a lot of students are encouraged to enter, even though they realistically don’t have a hope in Hades to win anything) through very good student work and all the way to top of the line professional images. After a while I got in sync with the judges and started guessing the scores pretty closely. The way it works makes it easy as well. The numbers are largely irrelevant, If it deservers Silver, then it needs 80 points. If it deserves Silver with Distinction, then it has to go over 85. But not over 90, or that’s Gold. And not many get Gold. Only the very best. I thought the judging was pretty fair overall, with some dubious decisions of course (there just is no accounting for tatse sometimes). There is a feeling that the AIPP judge dark and moody very highly, but that didn’t seem to be evident to me. Maybe times are a changing…

I didn’t have any entries in this year, but it was fascinating to see up close the actual prints that received all the accolades. And I can only say one thing – the level is just going up and up and up…

PS> The winners have been announced. Check out Canon’s site for more details.