POYi Reaction

I recently attended the “General News Picture Story” category of the POYi competition. I was generally frustrated and unimpressed with the stories submitted for the category. A majority of the stories noticeable lacked variety, with several pictures that looked very repetitive. It was clear that the judges nixed these stories almost instantaneously—they were looking for a variety of angles and lens choice. Another thing I noticed was that several stories looked more like sequences than actual stories. There were a lot of pictures that pretty much showed step-by-step what was happening—they seemed to be missing the point of what a picture story is.

Another thing that bothered me with the submissions is that they were overwhelmingly based on some kind of conflict or crisis. There were very few stories that seemed to have positive and uplifting messages. I feel like this totally feeds into the stereotype that the news today is all negative, and photographers are just capitalizing off of people’s pain and suffering. I think if some of the photographers had submitted positive stories in the competition, that they would have really stood out to the judges as being unique; something that haven’t seen lately.

One thing I noticed was that the judges really didn’t look at each submission for very long, despite how long some of the stories were. You had to grab their attention quickly and make a strong impression. And when the judges were looking at the stories in the first couple of rounds, the thumbnails of the pictures were so small and I found it hard to tell what was going on in some of the frames. After narrowing down their selection to about 20 stories, some of the judges made the comment that once they saw each individual picture larger, they didn’t care for the story as much as they thought they did or that they liked it even more now that they could see it better.

The biggest dilemma I noticed for the judges was what to do when there are a few really strong images in the story but there are also several images that don’t work. When they were going back through the submissions they previously eliminated, they talked about maybe bringing a few back in but eventually they decided that while they liked a couple of the pictures, there wasn’t enough to keep the whole story in. “I like three or four pictures in here but I don’t think the others hold it together,” said one judge. It made me realize how important each image is in telling the story effectively. Each picture needs to be a vital piece to the story and should say something new. Of the eventual first place winner, “Haiti Earthquake,” one of the judges said, “These pictures take me to a different place, they tell me a different story in each picture whereas so many of the other Haiti stories we’ve seen seem repetitive.”

Overall, going to the judging of this category was definitely a learning experience for me and I took a lot away from it. I hope I can go to more judging next week!