The art of photography

By Neil Fletcher

Communications Officer

It sounds like a cliché, but the fact is that the standard of imagery in our photo competition really does shoot up year after year. And every year it gets tougher and tougher to pick the winning twelve.

It’s not just that cameras are improving either, lots of perfectly acceptable phone pics this year for example, but the photographers are getting more intelligent, more informed, more inventive. They’re seeing better.

This year we were really impressed by the way everyone interpreted the theme “My Wild Sussex”. We kept this deliberately vague, precisely because we wanted to see what wild Sussex means to you. Of course there were plenty of stunning landscapes, but also really intimate wildlife portraits, from rutting deer to ambling newts to preening crickets. But we were especially pleased this year to see a number of images which included people, or urban environments – we are all still part of wild Sussex after all.

We had around 700 entries this year. These were fairly swiftly whittled down to 200. We then look at each one of these individually and give them a star-rating – takes a few hours and lots of cups of tea. Then we separate out the highest rated group, double check over the nearly highest rated group in case any need upgrading, and see how many we’ve got – we’re not looking for a specified number at this stage. We had 36. Now for the really difficult part – selecting the twelve. There’s no magic formula here. We look at all the images together to see what jumps out, we look at them individually. Sometimes we’re selecting those that get through, sometimes we’re eliminating those that don’t. There’s agreement, there’s arguing, there are reluctant compromises.

So how do we make the final decision? Well we’re constantly mindful of the theme of the competition, but the most powerful word in the theme is “My”. We finally selected our twelve based on how we thought the photographer was relating to the subject when they were taking, or making, the image. Could we ‘feel’ something of what the photographer was feeling? And more prosaically, could we look at the image every day for a month and continue to like it for all that time? That’s the art of photography.

See the final 12 images in the Sussex Wildlife Trust's 2015 Photo Competition and vote for your favourite here.

Neil is formerly photographer with The Natural History Museum, London; freelance photographer; and natural history photographer for publishers Dorling Kindersley.