What are the different awards a judge can give?

What are the different awards that judges can give?

Most Photocrowd contests have a judge.

If it is a Premium Contest run by Photocrowd, or one of our partners, the judge is called an ‘Expert Judge’ and is usually a professional photographer with relevant experience for that contest. If it is a Community Contest, that judge is called a ‘Community Judge’ and they will be the Photocrowd community member who created the contest. Elsewhere on the site you might see them referred to as ‘Experts’ and ‘Judges’ respectively.

Judges will review all the images entered into a contest, and can choose to give an award to an image if they think it deserves it. Those awards, what they mean, and how many ranking points they are worth, are as follows:

1st - the winning image, and the one that the judge preferred over all the others (10,000 Ranking Points)

Top 10 - 2nd place to 10th place (9,800 to 8,200 Ranking Points in 200 point steps)

Highly Commended - high quality imagery that the judge was very impressed by (7,000 Ranking Points)

Commended - quality imagery that has elements about it which the judge considers to be worthy of recognition (5,000 Ranking Points)

Merit - imagery that is technically sound, and on-brief for the contest (1,500 Ranking Points)

Shortlist - not many contests have a shortlist phase. Shortlists are usually announced as part of larger photo awards, and that will happen a few weeks before the winning images are announced. Shortlists are very prestigious, and usually consist of a small number of very high quality images selected from a much larger number of entries (8,000 Ranking Points)

When considering why an image has been given a particular award, do remember that judging is usually done by one individual, and so it is highly subjective. It is not the final word regarding an image’s merit!