Mike, I'd love to post one of my exceptional images. I'm still waiting for something that fits the bill however.
I'm not being flippant, just honest as I reckon most of us are.
I will keep striving though.
Hi Andy
It’s about definition, isn’t it? How do we define ‘exceptional’? Unusual, extraordinary, superior are synonyms - but against what frame of reference? I gave answers in a book on expertise in sport, published years ago.
For purposes of comparing people, exceptional performance can be normative, exclusive or both. Normative exceptionality implies superior performance on a skill possessed by most people (e.g., a 10 seconds 100m run by males in open competition). A proviso is that those standards vary with restricted sampling (e.g., no less exceptional is a 13 seconds 100m run by a man aged 70 years). Exclusive exceptionality implies competent performance on a skill possessed by few people (e.g., an 8-mile distance for men in a 1-hour race walk). Finally, an expert is someone who produces exceptional performance on a regular basis.
I’ll dispute your claim, Andy, that yourself and others on OPFI have yet to produce an exceptional photo. My reasoning is as follows. (1) Compared to some other activities, photography has dubious criteria for what makes the end product exceptional. (2) This lack of certainty owes to an elitist culture created by fiscal interests. (3) Ongoing technological advancements have broken the stranglehold of that culture on the evaluation of photographs. (4) On statistical grounds, it is nearly impossible for an OPFI contributor not to have produced an exceptional photo.
Regarding my own workplace and main recreational activity, appraisal of whether performance is exceptional, normal or poor is easily made by reference to norms based on approved quantitative measures. These are citation frequencies for scientific impact and performance time or finishing position for athletic races. For both activities, I can evaluate my standings over a full career and for specific performances. However, photography lacks acknowledged criteria to differentiate exceptional from acceptable images. Why is that?
The main reasons relate to elitism created by the photographic industry. (a) The manufacturing sector promoted criteria related to technical aspects of image quality. The reasons were to sell more products by continually upgrading the equipment. (b) Professional photographers colluded with this bias in order to affirm their exclusivity - only they could afford the expense. (c) Curators and gallery owners promoted self-serving standards (usually based on subjectively defined ‘artistic merit’) in order to convince people to buy products. (d) Outcomes of the preceding included the creation of three classes of photographer: professional photographers, serious amateurs and snap-shooters.
Until recently, the undisputed arbiters of photographic good taste were professionals in the industry. Amateur photographers meekly acquiesced to professional opinion, being too humble to consider their own images exceptional. However, advances in the manufacturing sector, the Internet, and particularly the Social Media resulted in abundances of both good quality images by amateurs and opportunities for their dissemination. The consequences included frequent workplace replacement of professional by amateur (or semi-professional) photographers able to perform comparable work at lower cost. In other words, the old elitist culture in photography is breaking or broken. However, some amateurs have yet to realize the implications for what constitutes an exceptional photo.
Reports on Facebook and Instagram indicate approximately 250,000 photographic uploads per minute on each site. Even if only 1% of such images were to satisfy undefined criteria as exceptional, those two sites alone provide 5,000 new exceptional images per minute. On statistical grounds alone, you can bet your last dollar that most of those exceptional images were by amateur photographers. If this is true for Social Media sites, surely it’s more so for a site peopled by serious photographers.
Before finishing, let’s consider identifiable criteria to differentiate exceptional from normal images in this more egalitarian photographic culture. Although Social Media sites report the number of ‘likes’, more discriminable criteria are available. We used short-term memorability of images in an article a few years ago. The <
pixabay.com> site includes information on the number of views and downloads for over 500,000 good quality images that are downloadable at no cost. Such data provide a goldmine for anyone wanting to develop and explore psychometrics related to image quality. Maybe I’ll do so after current research priorities are satisfied.
I hope that my closing comments won’t offend any OPFI contributors despite positive conclusions about your attainments. Simply that you recognize the existence of this new egalitarian photographic culture; throw off false modesty; come out of the closet; be forthright that your best photos are indeed exceptional. Finally, pay heed to Asher's opening question as a means to promote the frequency of your photos that are exceptional.
Cheers, Mike.