As summer fades into autumn once again it signals that the time is drawing near for me to delve into my animal photography collection to try to pick a winner for a photo contest that my local zoo runs. I've realized the value of input from other parties after last year, when I accepted other people's preferences over my own and won second place doing so. I know I have some strong biases, in particular towards oodles of ultra sharp fur detail at the expense of nearly anything else. I have a collection of possible finalists (I'm not ruling out taking any more) that I put onto my online gallery. I wanted to leave them fairly high resolution, I'm NEVER happy with how my shots look once I downsize them for forum posting. Perhaps it's my detail fetish.. I dunno. So.. relevant information.. first off, last year a picture of an Amur leopard won the grand prize. I fear that another leopard entry might be considered too similar, but being a cat person I naturally gravitate to the leopards, especially the other species they have, snow leopards. I managed to get some good shots of them in the snow this year and I think it makes for some good pictures. In particular everyone seems to love the shot of the snow leopard looking sideways (relative to its body position) towards the camera. It's an odd one because I don't really care for it at all, but everyone else seems to love it so I'm including all the shots I got during that moment to see which one is most liked. I was experimenting with processing so each shot in that series is going to look different, please judge processing and composition separately. I may have exaggerated the color of the fur but the grand prize winner last year really exaggerated the color on his leopard so apparently they accept or even like that. Also note that everything there is formated for widescreen viewing, which was a bonehead move on my part. The contest specifies 8x10 entries ONLY. So everything would have to be formatted differently with a loss in width, in some cases a switch to portrait orientation might make more sense. I initially processed these to be displayed on my widescreen laptop so I formatted them accordingly, my instinct to adapt them to the target device overrode my plan to judge them as 8x10 contest entries. I think my personal favorite is 5599. When I browse through this on my computer first I see 5578 which gets me into the "harsh winter landscape" mode and then I see 5599 and I think it carries that feeling even further. Plus I'm beside myself that I was able to capture visible snow being kicked up by one of his hind legs as he moved forwards. But I fear the image would lose a great deal of impact when being converted to 8x10. One of the things I'm thinking is that last year it was commented that all the contest winners were portrait style. They were, it was almost as if the animals had sat down in a portrait studio and had their pictures taken. I want a more dynamic image. The other thing I'm looking for is an image that gives you a feeling of connection to the animal. In that area my biases come into play again, of course I'm going to go for the snow leopards, I ALREADY feel a connection to them. The highlight of any zoo trip for me is if they're active and are giving me good picture opportunities. But I really would like to use a leopard picture if I can, and this year the good stuff I got was almost all snow leopard. It's almost not about ME winning the contest any more, I want a leopard to win it. They're the stars, I'm just holding the camera while they strut their stuff for me. Gary, I know you told me to enter the snow leopard looking sideways shot into a contest immediately, well.. this was the only contest I knew of that it would be appropriate for, so it had to wait. And now I have to make sure it's still the best of what I have. I really don't think the red panda shots are good enough, I processed them because I wanted to see if they held up against the others, and I don't think they do. But I still think they're good shots and I wanted to share them. For the record Poppy (the red panda in all the shots) was NOT sticking her tongue out at me, she was panting. It was in the upper 70s that day, and red pandas appear to be cold weather animals. I plan to go back to the zoo at least once to see if I can get anything better, they've got some new hummingbirds (that I should hopefully be able to get good closeup shots of) and also a pair of tiger cubs recently released into their outdoors exhibit. But I don't expect to get anything good enough, I don't think a hummingbird will be strong enough unless I get a jawdroppingly awesome shot and the tiger cubs are probably going to be too far away for me to get great shots, plus it's going to be hard to get good angles on them. For the record they've stated their judging policy is 40% originality (I try to judge that by looking up the and animals online on various galleries and seeing what kind of pictures everyone normally takes), 30% "nature of the subject matter", whatever that means.. and 30% clarity. This year was unique in that they're letting in pictures taken outside this particular zoo. The red panda shots and the elephant close up (another favorite of mine, it really surprised me) were taken at the Milwaukee zoo, everything else is Brookfield, the zoo that's running the contest. Even the squirrel. So anyway, the online gallery where I put all this stuff: http://dan7790.photos.de.com/c1369828.html The whole gallery is a mess. I just don't regularly update it, the other areas have an old collection of stuff that I haven't touched in ages. I added this one specifically to host these candidate pictures. I recommend you click the "full size" button on the bottom right corner of the screen when looking at a picture to view it as large as you can to see as much detail as possible. I admit I'm kind of showing off in a way.. I'm really proud of a lot of these pictures and I wanted to be able to show them off in full glorious resolution. But I also really want other opinions, I need the extra input to help evolve my judgment.
Personally, my favorite is 8849! I can't help smiling every time I take a peek at it! I couldn't tell you technically if it is the right choice, but I certainly connected with that little fellow. ;D Catherine
Oh no.. what have I done.. everyone is telling me something different.. this isn't helping me at all! No, seriously, I can't complain if opinions differ, I can still use that, it gives me a certain license to rely on my own preferences after all. Gary, I can't say if that's the exact shot I posted before (I believe it was still this year, though), but it's similar. I posted one shot from that series, but this time I used them all to look for preferences among the group. It kind of goes against the look I'm going for, but I love that you can see snow on his (or her) chin. Catherine, you're siding with my sister on that one. Believe me, I can't keep from smiling every time I look at it either. My issue with it is a sort of bias against cute. Don't get me wrong, I love cute, I'm a regular reader of a website that features only cute animal pictures. But my method for this contest is to go more for inspiring awe. As opposed to "awwwww". I don't know if it's a valid impulse, but I feel that serious pictures would tend to fare better. I'm not dismissing them quite yet though, I'm going to see if I can crop the shot to make it appear more artistic. Curse them for restricting me to one entry! Don't they know I'm critically indecisive?
