Why Camera Club Judges Are Wrong

[Mike Farley]

Well, that headline certainly got your attention.

PetaPixel has an article about where people direct their attention when looking at images. It turns out that canards such as lighter areas at the edge being a distraction and leading the eye through the image might not be valid. I must admit it is something about which I have wondered, but have never previously seen any research. At the time of writing, the Nature website with the full article is down for maintenance, but I will be taking a look when it is available.

https://petapixel.com/2017/09/27/eyes-d ... ngs-stick/

[Iggy]

The Nature paper tested subjects with real-world scenes.
The images shown in PetaPixel are hardly the type that would ever be shown at a camera club.
I only had a quick look at the PetaPixel feature but also the Nature abstract https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0208-0 and was not willing to pay $4.99 to see the whole paper.

A far fetched but interesting and more meaningful study as far as camera clubs are concerned, might be to subject at least a 100 judges and a 100 club members to a 1000 camera club images and analyse Attention, Meaning & Saliency Maps before jumping to any conclusions.

[Mike Farley]

Hi Iggy

I cannot disagree with anything you have written. By and large, the images shown in the PetaPixel article do not have any great aesthetic appeal. In general, that is what camera club photographers are trying to achieve rather than shoot documentary (and boring) shots of everyday scenes. When taken to that level, considerations such as composition and highlights at the edge of an image do play a greater role. That said, some judging can be formulaic and criticism levied for breaking the "rules" rather than assessing whether a particular element adds to or detracts from the overall effect of the image.