Judging North Dakota

A few weeks ago I was asked if I would help judge the North Dakota Press Association’s annual newspaper contest. Last year I helped judge West Virginia’s, which was not a whole lot of fun, to be honest.

So of course, when North Dakota asked, I said yes.

And then I put it off until the last possible moment, which meant I got up at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday to judge the contest. It wasn’t exactly how I planned the day, but I’ve had worse Sunday mornings, too. It was snowing hard outside so I cranked up the heat and yelled at my computer screen for a good two hours.

Newspaper contests are broken into categories. The bigger newspapers are in one category, the smaller ones in others, etc. etc. I’m not sure which category I judged, but the newspapers were definitely not large dailies and most looked like solid, mom-and-pop operations, where one or two people were doing all the work.

More often than not, small newspapers do not have someone who is trained in photography. I am not formally trained, either, but the saying goes even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile, and I’ve been fortunate enough to find a whole pile of them.

Still, I take at least three crappy photos a week, sometimes way more than that. I saw a moose the other day on a snowbank with snow falling all around it.

I got home and nearly every frame was out of focus.

It’s the sort of thing that makes you want to bash your head against a wall. On the other hand, I did get a picture of a squirrel scratching itself, which I saw at the very last moment, swung the camera around and nailed the shot just in time (with a big fat manual focus lens, no less).

It was sharp as a tack.

But I digress.

Judging the North Dakota photos was akin to torture. Not because the photos were bad — but because of the way they were played.

One fellow had a very nice picture of a litter of red fox pups sitting in a row. The foxes all had different expressions on their faces. But the powers that be in the newspaper ran it two columns on the bottom of page one.

Two columns is about four inches wide, maybe a little less.

Uggghhh.

I think the main photo on that front page was a grip-and-grin group shot, one of the most boring photos on planet Earth. (Mel Ruder, the founder of this newspaper, is the only photog I know who took great group shots. He always got interesting faces, which is hard to do.)

Another photographer had a nice moody shot of lightning and a tree, but the editor saw fit to run it on an inside page, way too small. Next to it, there was — you guessed it — another grip and grin.

My advice to North Dakota is simple. If you have a good pic and you think it’s a good pic, run it big, please. Eight inches wide, at least. It’s what I call the refrigerator factor. If it’s good, someone will cut it out and put it on the fridge.

Trust me.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.