My Australian Professional Photography Awards Results, Where to From Here

Australia’s most prestigious professional photography awards, the APPAs, has now been run and won. Unfortunately not by me. In fact, for the first time in years I didn’t get a single award. Some of the judges scored my images high enough for awards but others didn’t – and that’s the nature of the beast.

So what happened?

My images were all deemed to be of a high professional standard so how could I make them better and bring them up to award level? The answer to that is that I don’t think I could do any more to them. I just have to pick different images next time. For example, with one of my images two judges loved it, another hated it. For another image one judge felt it was “poorly cropped” but another said it was “perfectly cropped”.

A big trend was to muted tones for colour images and black and white images with a tobacco or tea coloured sepia style tint to them. My images were all about bold colour and rich black and white. Just what I like, but not the ‘in’ thing.

So what to do next year?

I don’t believe in chasing trends but just shooting great images that my clients love. To paraphrase a football term, it’s back to the basics. Solid, perfectly printed images showing strong emotion and high quality of post processing. Then I just need a solid dose of luck.

If you want to see some of the winning images, there is a gallery here.