New acronym suggestion: POG for Pentax Online Gallery. Not exactly off-topic, but I sense that this has limited interest anyway.
Then into rant mode. Warning, this is long. It's the sort of post that happens when you've thought about something for too long. :-) Flipping through the Pentax Online Gallery (POG) has revealed both awe-inspiring and surprising submissions. Sometimes it's been a real eye-opener to great photos that otherwise wouldn't have caught my attention. This, I think, is a really great asset for a gallery because it brings inspiration to look beyond the accustomed. For myself, I know I tend to specialise in one, or perhaps a few types of photography. When seeing pictures from my own sphere of interest, I have appreciation for the tricks of the trade needed to accomplish them, as well as appreciation for the photographer's artistic interpretation. When presented with photos outside my sphere of interest, however, I must confess ignorance of the finer points of the craft. Studio lightning, for example, seems next to magic to me. As does fashion photography all together. After a couple of beers, I would even accuse the latter of black magic, but that's a different story all together. In contrast to myself, I expect a skilled judge of photography to have a much broader general competence on photography, and to be able to select shots for display from a great variety of styles and genres. Until recently, the POG fulfilled my expectations. I have seen a very reasonable, perhaps too mild, sifting of my own submissions. I look at the presented work of other photographers and it seems well-selected, creating a nicely balanced gallery on the whole. The judges seems to have a clear view on what they want, for Pentax, for the Gallery, and in terms of aestethics and genre representation. Based on this experience, I TRUST the judges to provide me with a viewing experience of interest. I also feel that I can trust them to weed out those of my images that don't fit in the gallery. For quality reasons, or for policy or aestethical reasons. Long-time submitters have noticed that the threshold for acceptance has gone up with time, and have ascribed it to the growing base of photos to choose from. At one point, the sheer volume of that base swamped the judging process completely. To ease the workload of the judges, Pentax opened the submission pool to voting by participating photographers. A peer-review system. In the FAQ it says that votes influence the selection process, but that the judges will have the final word. In principle, this is the same kind of system that science use to sift out research papers worthy of publication, so it should vouch for a high quality threshold for the gallery. In practice, however, I'm not so sure it is a good idea. To continue the analogy with science, what they are really doing is equivalent to set theologians to evaluate papers on evolution, or astrophysicists to evaluate papers on bronze-age archaeology. To have me casting votes on studio portraits, for example, is one sure-fire way of disregarding the finer points of the craft. Of course it can be said that a peer-review system ensure a democratic election process that is much more "fair" than having a small panel of judges. It can also be said that this is a very valuable tool for the judges which will simplify their job tremendously. But wait just a minute. Imagine you're a judge. You get a set of photos, short-listed through voting. How does that influence your decision? Would you assume the highest voted photos to be the highest quality photos in the total batch by default? How far below the short-list would you check for overlooked gems before flushing the rest? Do you _really_ trust the submitters themselves to pick a balanced sample of good photos for the gallery? What if the peers are overly negative, or perhaps overly positive? With overly negative peers, there will be good shots in the "Nay" part of the list. Online communities have plenty of examples of this, like the "deleteme"-movement on flickr, for example. With overly positive peers, OTOH, you hardly get any reduction in the judges' workload at all. I would like to question how probable it is that the voting hit the "Goldilocks zone". Another issue with the notion of democracy is that it works best when there are few candidates and many votes for each. In this case you have a lot more "candidates" than voters, and a limited number of votes for each photo. Pentax hasn't said how many, but there must be a fairly strict limit like eg. 10 votes per photo. Otherwise, if everyone would have to vote for everything, it would take too long to complete the poll for each candidate photo, and leave all participants with as much job as each of the judges had previously. Effectively it actually isn't democracy at all, because only a minority is allowed to vote. The minority that happens to be the first 10 (or so) to review one particular photo. Those who frequently log on and cast votes will have much more influence than the occasional submitter. All of this will radically change WHICH images are selected. I can't see how it is supposed to be a good and purposeful sifting, but maybe I'm overly skeptic. Anyone care to speak up for the other side? Best, Jostein -- http://www.alunfoto.no/galleri/ http://alunfoto.blogspot.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
