If you look at a set of 6 pictures and can’t tell the theme, then the pictures are failures! I first look for the theme when I look at the pictures before I vote…I dismiss all that don’t fit the stated theme then look for the one that does best from the choice.
Henry,
One of the recent themes was “eerie” as I recall. Are you telling me that if you did not know what the theme was, you could look at the pictures and conclude that the theme must be “eerie”? There are probably a hundred other themes that could perfectly fit all the photos in that submission.
The way I look at it, making the photograph requires artistic and technical skill. Matching the theme seems totally unrelated to that basic photographic skill, either in making the photo or in judging it. Matching the theme seems unrelated to the true point of the contest for the best photo. It is like taking a photo contest and combining it with a scavenger hunt.
The point of the contest is to select the photo that best reflects the theme. That best photo should (and based on the work of many of our resident photographers, will) include good quality - exposure, composition, etc, and so on.
Once again, you can produce a technically perfect photo - perfect framing, perfect composition, perfect exposure, everything. But if the theme is “fog” and there is no fog in your picture, you missed the point.
And that is the challenge to the photographer - not just to present a great picture, but to present a great picture that tells the story the theme suggests. If there are a half dozen pictures in the “gallery,” as has already been said, you should be able to discern reasonably well the theme of the gallery just by looking at them.
Going back to that portfolio I had to do for that photo class. If you leafed through my 8 or so 8x10 B&Ws, I would hope that it would strike you that the theme was railroads.
If you didn’t guess that, then I did a lousy job of representing my theme.
“eerie” was one of the worst themes used because it was never achieved in any of the pictures. You may notice I often make comment about how the theme was never met in any of the pictures. And I don’t know if they know what they mean and want when they choose a theme but just hope there are enough pictures so that they can assemble pictures that might fit. Anybody and everybody has a free for all photography contest…and if I don’t like diesels or steam or passenger cars or California or New York or the mountains or the desert, then none of the picture, or at least half of the pictures, won’t attract my attention, so why judge them? Say you want just GP7s or just mountain railroading or just red trains or blue trains or big city or rural mainlines or yard or yards at night…then you have a compass on how to judge the pics…it’s not what you like but how well the photographer captured the theme.