Yeah, the process has to move pretty quickly. Otherwise you get bogged down and hold up the rest of the show.
When we were still judging slides, it seemed like it took forever just to get the slides on the boxes for the first pass. Some of them didn't even get all the way on the box before being cut, obvious technical flaws being the primary reason. If you have 300 to 400 hundred photos to get through, and a window of about two hours, there's not a lot of time to dawdle over the lightbox. Now, that said, we do have a running pile of the Nearly There shots that have some minor tech flaw, or are just below some other shots in the same category. Those are the ones that Mark and I run through on Sunday morning for the crowd, and more than once I've been told it's the most educational part of the photo weekend. I know we enjoy it greatly, and are always looking for shots we can use. Once we get down to just a few left in a category, we do as thorough an examination as we can in the time allowed. Often, any one of three or four shots could be the winner, and they get shuffled around several times. During all this, we are completely focused on the task at hand. It's somewhat chaotic down there, but we are tuned in to the photographs. The discussion is fast, but professional, and we've worked together long enough that we have a bit of verbal shorthand we use, and not much of it would make sense to anyone not in the room or used to the process. And I have to say we could not do what we do-- judge, work up points of discussion for the Mentions, all that-- if not for the support we get from everyone else on the team down there. I don't know if they want to be named, but they know who they are, and they're the ones who do the real work on the contest. Moving to digital last year helped us out, because we were able to do a run-through on Saturday night, which gave us more time on Sunday morning to study the shots left a little more closely. Plus, since we got an early start, we didn't panic when our original planned workflow fell apart and we had to build another from scratch. On Apr 30, 2007, at 7:41 PM, Mark Cassino wrote: > <Snip> > A few thoughts > -<Snip> Doug Brewer http://www.drivingtheflies.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
