AMPOTT Awards
Judges’ Remarks, 2009

I am pleased to note that the quality of the entries in this year’s competition continues to grow. In previous years, the judges lamented the widely differing quality of the prints we were asked to judge and I took the decision this year to solicit digital files for the judging process.

In retrospect, there was a lot of preparation that needed to be done to make ready for such a fundamental change. For the photographers, it seems to have been a boon. There were more entries from a wider range of visual media professionals and the images we saw were of excellent quality.

It would have been nice if more of the photographers had read the entry requirements more carefully and provided files renamed according to the format that we requested.
There were real challenges in putting together a workflow that honoured the principles of the print based competition while preserving our now five year old commitment to judging blind, with no knowledge of the authorship of the works we viewed. These setbacks led to unfortunate delays in the judging and for that, I apologise.

Michael Tikasingh stepped up to be our digital technician and Vishnu Balroop provided us with an excellent projector that enabled judging of images on a ten foot canvas. There was no pixel that went unevaluated in this judging of the competition.

Because of his participation, the veil that is drawn between entrants and judges remained opaque. The results of the print category this evening reflect the best principles of collective evaluation of photography that my colleagues William Aguiton and Maurice Brown were able to bring to bear, with me, on the work you submitted.

Fred Thornhill and Barry McComie accepted our invitation to review the videos submitted to this year’s competition and devised appropriate criteria for evaluating the work. They lamented, as do we, the relative paucity of entries and the abscence of the work of entire media houses, which makes the competition poorer and the winners less challenged in the long term.

Video is a category that will require more attention from this association for the next round of judging.
That said, I would like, once again, to turn my attention to that specific issue, the matter of this association.
We have, I think, come to a point at which we must, collectively, decide whether an Association of Media Photographers makes sense for the people it was formed to serve.
I believe that we do, and it is for that reason that I have reached out a helping hand to Krishna whenever he has asked.

Some of you have not, or have done so incompletely, and this has led to a situation in which AMPOTT now consists of one man tending to a house of children.
That man’s persistence has allowed the association to continue for many years, producing this awards show and from time to time, rallying legal advice when members of the visual media corps have been attacked, both metaphorically and literally.

I do not believe that this is good enough, though is is more than enough to ask of a single person. I believe that we can do better and we can do more if as members of a profession, we choose to sacrifice and participate in the business we have chosen for our careers.

Now I completely understand that some of you do not really think that being a photographer or videographer in the media is the beginning and end of your ambitions. It is my belief, however, that there is no finer or more fulfilling calling, regardless of the different endeavours in which I have been involved over my working life.

In the coming weeks, Krishna and I will be approaching several young professionals and would love to hear from others willing to volunteer time and energy toward bringing more to bear on the business of this association; constituting a board of governance, reviewing its constitution, deciding on goals both practical and dreamstate and building a stronger, more valuable structure on what exists today.

There are people who would like to help AMPOTT, but they need to see that photographers and videographers are willing to help themselves first and put the necessary effort into an organisation that represents photographer's interests and delivers on their professional needs.

I will confess to you right here and now, that these evenings are bittersweet for me. I continue to work as a photographer, publishing work in the press and I would love to match my capabilities with young, keen competitors.

It’s been necessary to set those lingering desires aside to be able to work at giving you the photography competition that I would like to enter, so my envy of both the competitors and winners this evening is complete.
The next step of our event is the unveiling of our slate of winners for the year 2008. I congratulate all our participants on their vigorous efforts and look forward to being challenged by the quality of your submissions in the future.

July 11, 2009

Tags: Competition

Quite a few visitors to the site and they're clicking on everything! Great for AMPOTT, not so good for me. Still to come, instructions on what you need to do get your web page and e-mail set up, posting the awards for 2006 and 2007 and setting up log-ins for the forums.
Help with captions and ensuring that things are correct would be useful. Please send any comments or corrections using this contact page...

Photographs of the 2007 Awards ceremony have been posted here...

Judges' Comments for the AMPOTT photo and video awards for 2007, 2006 and 2005 have been posted here...

About the images posted on this website... Read More...

Tags: Copyright

At a gala awards ceremony on the evening of August 30, 2007, media photographers and videographers were celebrated at an awards ceremony hosted by AMPOTT. You can find a complete list of award winners here... Read More...

Tags: Awards, Winners