Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Judging

By Ellen Bedrosian After a recent competition, the Executive Board was asked to write guidelines for judges to use when scoring images. It seemed that some members felt that judges were being inconsistent in their critiques and subsequent scoring. Since I’d been judging for over a year, I volunteered to write it up. I got

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The Power of Tagging Your Photos

By Ellen Bedrosian When the cherry blossoms bloom, it’s a big event around the word. Entire festivals in many cities revolve around the awakening of the pink beauties from their winter slumber. Tokyo and Washington D.C. are particularly well-known cherry blossom destinations. Closer to home is Branch Brook Park that spreads across the cities of

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Waking up to Magic

By Ellen Bedrosian I think every photographer in Bergen County woke up with the same idea on Friday morning (2/5/16). The overnight snowfall was pure magic. A winter wonderland of epic proportions. It was heavy and full. The trees and shrubs were majestic in their winter white. Alas, I had to take my 89-year-old mother

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Crossing Over to the Dark Side

By Ellen Bedrosian During the summer, I participated in training given by the NJFCC to become a judge.  Although not quite as bad as Anakin Skywalker crossing over to the dark side and becoming Darth Vader, my main reason for becoming a judge was simple: I felt that the current pool of judges generally scored creative

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What Makes a Photograph “Good”?

By Ellen Bedrosian

During a recent field trip to the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan, I snapped some images of street scenes with my iPhone to post on TCC’s Facebook page and to send to a friend of mine who couldn’t make the trip. As I was deleting them from my phone that evening, this photo of the prominent black leaders that was hanging on a street vendor’s booth grabbed my eye. The more I looked at it, the more I got lost in the details of the image. Details that had escaped me when I first snapped it. So I emailed it to myself to get a better look at it on my computer screen.

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Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone

By Ellen Bedrosian

On a bright and sunny Sunday in April, I reported for my first paid assignment as a freelance photographer. A few weeks prior to getting this assignment, I’d answered an ad on CraigsList for iPhone users to take photographs for a new app that was being developed.

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Zen and the art of competition

By Ellen Bedrosian

My feelings about competitions have most definitely evolved over the 10 years I’ve been a member of the club. When I was a beginner, I religiously scribbled down judges’ comments about every image that I entered. Every newbie mistake they criticized (over saturating used to be a big one for me) was dutifully noted, never to be repeated again.

“Bahama Jaws” scored a 9 and I forgot I had entered it.

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