It can be a pretty lonely gig as a wedding photographer. Sure, the weddings themselves are ridiculously social and fun, but that’s only 30 or 40 days of the year. The rest of the time is spent behind a keyboard editing photos, designing albums, doing admin and resisting the urge to locate and watch all the cat videos the internet offers because you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder or an IT department running monthly reports showing which employees used the internet the most (I got caught out by that once in my past life, oops).
One of the highlights of the social calendar is the SAPPAs. It’s that time of year where everyone crawls out from behind their respective screens and gets together to see what everyone else has been doing. Photographers can enter up to 4 prints per category in up to 3 categories, so 12 prints in total. In previous years I have entered the Travel and Wedding categories but the last 2 years have been only weddings because, well, I’ve got kids now so trips to Borneo and Zanzibar and East Africa have been replaced with beach houses in Aldinga (for now). The judging is conducted over 2 days and then there’s an awards dinner at the end of it where awards are handed out and we eat dinner. It’s kind of like the Logies but less tragic.
The way the judging works is that each print is presented before a panel of 5 judges who each give it a score out of 100 independently, these are then averaged out to give you a score for your print (it’s slightly more complicated than this but the finer points of the scoring system have no place here). If any judge considers an error was made in the judging process then they are able to officially challenge and the judges all have a bit of a chat about things and resubmit their scores. It’s a very transparent process, you’re free to go and watch the judging live or stream it online (it’s all still online at the time of writing this – you can watch it at this link). Once the judging ends for each category the scores from that category are all added together and the top three aggregate scores are the category finalists provided they are above 320 cumulative points. (I feel like I said ‘category’ too many times in that sentence. Category.)
I entered my first SAPPAs 5 years ago. On one hand it feels like it was forever ago (more than 5 years) but on the other hand I can’t believe I’ve entered 5 SAPPAs already (feels like fewer). I picked up a few awards in my first couple of years but it wasn’t until year 3 that I started to find my groove. That year I was runner up in the travel category and my wedding prints scored quite well too, although not well enough to be a finalist. Last year I was knocking on the finalist door but fell just short and this year I finally broke through and was named as one of three finalists in the wedding category!!
I didn’t win.
But I didn’t care. Just to be a finalist was victory enough, to finish top 3 in the most prestigious wedding photography competition in the state is a giddy thrill, the kind of thing that keeps you going when you return to your trackies and hoodie for those long hours of solitude in front of a screen.
Huge congratulations to Ky Luu for taking out the Wedding category again (!) and to Gee Greenslade for winning the overall South Australian Photographer of the Year. You can see all the winning entries here, some pretty epic work on display as always.
