The science behind a winning image
http://blog.cpoy.org/
Contest season is coming upon us quickly. This week the College Photographer of the Year was judged at the University of Missouri. It’s always interesting to go to the judging and listen to the discussions about what it takes to have a winning image or portfolio. It’s such a subjective matter and its fun to hear the judges argue it out.
This year while browsing through the site I came upon their blog which gives a pretty good behind the scenes look.
The most interesting thing I saw on the blog was their Data breakdown of the sports action entries (see graphs above and below). According to the site “CPOY took the in-camera data for all 636 of the images entered in sports action and crunched it according to aperture, shutter speed and focal length (we added camera make and model just for fun).”
http://blog.cpoy.org/
They found that for sports action the most popular camera was a D3, lens was a 300mm, aperature was f/2.8, and shutter speed was 1/1000.
That sounds about right for a lot of sporting event situations but the one question that came to my mind when looking at all this data is - how can so many students afford the D3? These students are using better cameras than we are.
Learn more about the history of PICTURES
It’s quite possible students are using school equipment, like at the University of Missouri. Nikon lends the school gear for student use, then sells it at the end of the year.
I was actually surprised that the D3 was the most commonly used camera. I thought it would’ve been some form of the Canon 1D. Maybe that’s more accurate for the Photo of the Year competition.
Thanks Emily, very interesting, appreciate the post. Realizing these are stats but … just dream for a minute
D3 with a 300mm F/2.8 lens - and since we’re dreaming, throw in VR
$5k body + $6k glass = a very nice dream
BTW, I’ve noticed the blog’s activity hassignificantly picked up in the past couple of weeks. Thanks to all the staff! Really enjoying it!! THANKS!
Irene- great point about students using school equipment, I wonder if any students out there could comment on this…. Im curious now.
Also here is the link to the winning action sports images.
http://www.cpoy.org/index.php?s=WinningImages&yr=64&c=184
Check them out, there is some nice stuff in there.
I know when I went to Mizzou the cameras the photography people carried around looked school issued– the lenses especially I don’t know who could’ve afforded. I may have seen some tags on the bags as well, which I was always lusting after. Interesting that it’s only nikon and canon. I use a Sony alpha, which is less-than-perfect at high iso, but I really like the second organization wheel on it. I think they have since moved away from that.