Does anyone else think that the contest (would) have been much more fair if all 5 of the judges had an opportunity to judge all the images, instead of just the 10 images that were chosen by Arthur Morris and 2 other people?<\/em>“<\/h2>\nHere is my answer: Calvin, The contest might possibly have been a bit more fair had we sent all 5,500 images to our four professional judges. The problem is that they all would have quit immediately. They are busy folks who kindly agreed to help with the final judging. They each spent a total of between 1 1\/2 and 3 hours of their valuable time to carefully consider the 10-20 images in each of the 11 categories. All major contests have initial rounds of judging by a small group of involved folks. The panel of big-name judges never get to see the vast majority of entered images. In short, your implied suggestion is both impractical and unworkable. <\/p>\n
It took Peter Kes, Denise Ippolito, and me nearly three full 8-hour days of hard work to choose the images that went to the judges. As I wrote elsewhere, this process was an extremely difficult one. To be fair to the panel of judges, we decided to send no more than twenty images forward in each of the eleven categories. In some categories–including the Captive category–getting down to twenty or less was fairly easy. In the more popular categories like Portraits, Action, Flight, and Behavior, getting down to 20 was wrenchingly difficult. At times I felt like a very cruel America’s Got Talent judge. As we got close to 20, we compared the strengths and weaknesses of some of the images while others clearly merited being included in the final group. If even one of us liked an image for the finals, it was included. As we deleted and refined our choices, we would often say, “This is an excellent image. If it were to be awarded a prize, would you be proud of our choice?” If all of us answered “No,” that image would be eliminated. <\/p>\n
You mentioned “10 images” but in fact 163 of the 5,500 entered images went to the judges. A quick analysis of the public voting would seem to indicate that the initial selection process worked extremely well as all but 1 of the 10 images have garnered at least a single first place vote while two of the images are run-away points leaders. It will be interesting to see how the public evaluation compares to the actual picks of the judges: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd….<\/p>\n
Interestingly enough, Calvin did not enter the contest nor did he take the five minutes to judge the presented images…. <\/p>\n
Do take a moment to leave a comment and answer Calvin’s original question: “Does anyone else think that the contest would have been much more fair if all 5 of the judges had an opportunity to judge all the images, instead of just the 10 images that were chosen by Arthur Morris and 2 other people?”<\/p>\n
Mette’s Comment<\/h3>\n
Mette (first name or last?) posted the following:<\/p>\n
T(o)ucan 5
\nFlamingo 4<\/p>\n
“(I) can\u2019t mark the other photos because they are not up to my standards. I would love to (see) the the photos that didn\u2019t make it if these did.<\/em>“<\/h2>\nInterestingly enough, Mette did not enter the contest. Quite obviously, the rest of the group does not agree with Mette’s assessment. Please take a moment to let Mette know what you think of her comment. As I do not want to influence your responses, I will be sharing my thoughts on her comment later on.<\/p>\n
To Be Honest<\/h3>\n
To be honest, I seriously considered deleting both of the comments above. Each was up for moderation; they needed to be approved by me in order to be visible. Like it or not there is no freedom of speech on my blog. <\/p>\n
I was reading an article in Sports Illustrated yesterday by SI Editor Terry McDonnell in which he quoted SI Senior Writer Micheal Farber: “”But shining a light is never a bad thing, no matter what is illuminated.” Instantly it became clear to me that I should share both Calvin’s and Mette’s comments with the group. So that is what I did. <\/p>\n
Those who enjoy any type of sports would surely enjoy reading “In My Tribe”; you can access the entire article by clicking here<\/a>. There is lots of outstanding writing in Sports Illustrated and the article ranks right up there with the best. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Contest Concerns… <\/p>\n
Calvin (no last name) posted the comment below at yesterday’s hugely popular “You be the Judge: Captive” blog post here. (Voting will be open till 8am eastern time on Friday, 5\/18\/12 so it is not too late to join the fun and see how you do compared to the judges.)<\/p>\n
“Does anyone else […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-147","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.birdsasart-blog.com\/baa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}