Contest Time

January 11, 2007

It’s contest entry time. Most of the major contest deadlines hit us in January and February. So at the start of every year, news photographers around the world force themselves to sit at the computer going through their work from the past year. It can be a hellish exercise and in the end, contests are no way to measure how successful your year was.

Every time I took a great photo last year, all the other photographers I’m competing with did as well. So for a photograph to win in a contest, it really has to stand out from the competition. And because of that, contest winning photos are often the oddball shots, the fluke moments, and sometimes the result of luck rather than hard work. Contest wins are no good measure of a photographer’s success. Don’t get me wrong, winning is great and losing sucks. But in the end I’d rather be remembered for being consistently above-average than for being once-in-a-while excellent.

The photo above is a shot I took last January at the 2006 Freestyle FIS World Cup at Deer Valley. It’s a shot I’m entering in the World Press Photo Contest. It’s a different kind of photograph and it will stand out. But mark my words, it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of winning.

This post also appeared on my work blog, on the Tribune’s website.

Posted by trent | Filed Under On Assignment, Photographs, Trent 

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