We wouldn’t be Irish if we didn’t leave things till the last minute!
As expected there was a huge flood of pictures entered for the awards in the last 48 hours. Just under 2,500 images were entered in the final two days of the competition.
In some cases, no pun intended, the best wine was kept till last and here are a just a few of the images which caught our eye.
Now our panel of judges have started the mammoth task of looking at over 7,000 images entered by 1,100 photographers.
The pictures are scored initially online, first by creating a "longlist" in each category and then in a second wave of online judging produce a shortlist category by category. The judges all then meet together and after much debate select the winners and runners-up in each category.
Then the hard choice of deciding on the Photographer of the Year award based on the highest scores across an entire photographer's entry. For this overall award the judges will be looking out for someone with a consistently high standard and a cohesive vision for their image-making. The Photograph of the Year is chosen from the categories – it’s often a difficult choice too as it’s hard to compare an image in the Street category with say a Nature picture.
Each of the winners of the two major awards will receive a cheque for €1,000. As we work our way through the categories we'll be creating online galleries of the best images in each category over the next few weeks so keep an eye on irishtimes.com/photography.
Judging pictures can be quite subjective – you may not agree with our choices – so this year we’ve inaugurated a new award, the Bermingham Cameras People’s Choice Prize, kindly sponsored by the popular and long-established camera shop on Burgh Quay in Dublin. There will be a special trophy for the photographer who takes that award and there will be a €500 voucher for one lucky reader who chooses the winning image from the panel which we will be opening to a public vote next week so look out for that in the days ahead.
So keep an eye on irishtimes.com/photography over the next few weeks and look out for the paper on Saturday July 4th when we will be announcing all the winners and publishing a display of the pictures in the Weekend Review section of the paper.
