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 Exciting. Inspiring. Amazing. We could wear out the thesaurus describing the nearly 70,000 entries in this year’s International Picture Contest. In our 10th year of organizing and judging this competition, we continue to be awed by your talent, vision, and love of photography. But there are four more words that describe this year’s winners: Digital...to a degree.
Most of the winning shots had their color and contrast, and sometimes sharpness and other traits, adjusted in an image-editing program—typically a version of Adobe Photoshop. But here’s the shocker: almost all of the winning pictures were shot on film!
Just eight of the winning photos were taken with digital cameras. Twenty-eight were recorded on film—17 of them were then scanned. (Only 11 were processed and printed traditionally.) In most cases, the computer-aided adjustments were the same sort you’d make in a traditional darkroom. Twenty-five percent of the winners were black-and-white (some started in color, and were then desaturated with software).
It’s clear that digital image editing provides a competitive edge. But as you can see by this year’s winners, it’s now more a tool than a novelty. We saw far fewer digital gimmicks than in recent years, and so few photographers entered the narrowly defined “Computer Manipulation” category that we combined it with “Fine Art” to make a new “Creative” category.
“Photojournalism” and “Portrait” winners were mostly shot on film; “Sports,” primarily using digital SLRs. And—for the fourth year in a row—the “Grand Prize” winner was shot digitally.
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