You may have noticed links to the Pentax photo Gallery on various pages around this site (if not, here’s one: www.pentaxphotogallery.com/markroberts). It’s an online photo gallery set up by Pentax to show off work produced by their equipment. Anyone who shoots with Pentax gear can sign up and submit photos. But take note: The standard for getting accepted is quite high and seems to be getting higher all the time as more and more amazing shots appear the Gallery.
And therein lies a tale, because on various discussion fora around the ‘net, we’re seeing complaints from people whose images were rejected (the management of the Gallery prefer to say “declinedâ€, but as one who likes to call a spade a shovel, I’ll “decline†the use of that euphemism myself). In many cases, the rejected images are so mediocre that one has to wonder what the submitter was thinking in the first place. One look at the Pentax Photo Gallery should be all you need to determine that it’s a place for those once-in-a-blue-moon (for most of us) “wow†shots. The standard isn’t how the shot compares to your other photos, but how it compares to the other photos already in the Gallery. Take a look and ask yourself how you measure up. It always leaves me humbled.
Still, there are a lot of superb photographs that get rejected and this leaves a lot of people baffled. It shouldn’t. Think for a moment about the intended purpose of the Gallery. When a company like Pentax goes to the trouble and expense (development of a database-driven site with a complex Flash-based front end and major bandwidth costs — this site cost them a lot), they do so with one goal in mind and it’s not promoting art or photography and it’s definitely not promoting my art or photography. It’s selling camera gear. To be accepted, a photo not only has to good art, it has to demonstrate qualities that will make people want to purchase the equipment that made it. There’s plenty of great photographic art that’s underexposed, grainy/noisy, blurred, etc. But that ain’t gonna sell cameras. I have a friend who does brilliant street photography in Toronto. Many of his shots make deliberate use of camera movement or moving subjects and slow shutter speeds, grain and noise, etc. to create moody, evocative images of startling power. Everything he submitted to the Gallery was rejected. Many of my favorite Henri Cartier-Bresson photos wouldn’t make it into the Pentax Photo Gallery.
Evocative images may move people, but they don’t necessarily make them think, “I want to buy the camera/lens that made that photo!”
Here’s a shot of mine that I entered in a national photography contest last year. It’s one of my all-time favorites and, much to my delight, took first place in the photo contest (winning me a nifty lens worth about $1000.00). Unfortunately, that fog that gives the photo it’s wonderfully atmospheric (pun intended) look also obscures any fine detail in the image, so it makes the lens look much less sharp than it really is (or at least hides how sharp the lens is). Though it took first place in one photo contest, it was — understandably — rejected by the Pentax Photo Gallery.
Of course, photographs can be sharp and perfectly exposed and still be good from an artistic standpoint. But rather than try to be a gallery of all kinds of photography, the Pentax Photo Gallery has chosen to limit their scope, and even from a strictly artistic standpoint that’s almost always a good idea: Winston Churchill supposedly said, “I don’t know the secret to success but I know the secret to failure: Trying to please everyone”. One of the Pentax Photo Gallery qualifications has to be the notion that the end result will help them sell their product. They rely on this for the paychecks they get every week, feeding their families, etc. Their priorities can’t be the same as ours.
Just as we have to accept that they have their own reasons for creating and maintaining the Gallery, they certainly recognize that we participants have our own agenda in submitting photography. I’m not sending them my photos because I want to help them sell gear! I’m doing it to try to promote my work and I have to be as pragmatic and hard-nosed about it as they do. For example, if you try to update the technical data that accompanies one of your already-accepted photographs, it gets pulled from the Gallery and re-entered in the judging queue… and quite often rejected upon re-evaluation. After having this happen to me once, I asked why this was the case and went through several emails with someone who evaded the question every time. In retrospect, it’s obvious that they’re using it as an excuse to “thin the herdâ€, so to speak, and cull images that they feel no longer measure up to current standards. I therefore decided never to correct erroneous data again. Would Pentax be better off if all the data associated with my images in the Gallery were accurate? Probably. But just as they’re not running the Gallery for their health, I’m not participating in it for mine (nor theirs).
Each side has to recognize the independent motives of the other and make allowances for them. Interestingly, I read message board a post from a photographer who had submitted images to the Pentax Photo Gallery and to one other juried online gallery (I’ll provide the link when I find it again). All the shots he had rejected from the Pentax Photo Gallery were accepted by the other gallery. And all the shots accepted by the Pentax Photo Gallery were rejected by the other gallery! I looked at both sets of images and frankly and all his shots blew me away. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
