Photography awards?

[Harvey_nikon]

hi all,

While sitting in my weddings togs office while he and the wife went over our album I noticed he had quite a lot of nominations/awards on his wall from companies like Kodak.

I was just wondering how you get nominated or win awards from these companies? I've checked the website over but didn't spot anything obvious!

What other companies/groups do this?

And, has anyone here won or been nominated for or won something?

 

[HoppyUK]

There are lots of inter-industry awards going about, in all lines of business. I used to run a few of them. It's all a bit of you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours.

In other words, you buy lots of my product, and I'll give you an award, using my high profile brand name, to say how wonderful you are, so you get more business, and buy more product, and we all live happily ever after.

It works well, doesn't it?!

 

[Lensflare]

To be fair, some of the awards, like the Fuji prizes and the Kodak gold awards were always well regarded within the industry because the pictures that won were always of a high standard.

However, many of the winning wedding pictures WERE NOT TAKEN AT WEDDINGS. They were done for the competitions and were set up with models to produce portoflios for photographers and for venues. The same names kept cropping up year fater year, Thompson was one, Cleghorn was another (both on th electure circuit).

Don't get me wrong, the pictures were brilliant, both Tommo and Cleggy are brilliant photographers (Cleggy used to do some really off the wall things - like sticking a slave flash in the brides bra strap one wedding, so her veil was all backlit!). I soon found out it was a bit of closed shop, and once you got in the circle, you were one of the favoured ones.

One thing you can be certain of though, there were no rubbish photographers with either Fuji, Kodak or BIPP awards. The MPA ones were never seen as being as so meanignful, but they still required a good picture to win them.

As Hoppy says, the whole lot were a mutual back-slapping exercise. One reason I now belong to NO photo industry organisations whatever. Guess what? My business has not gone down at all, I have still expanded. I have saved myself about £1000 a year - a nice week away fishing, thanks you!