Montage 2005 - NUSPS

[reachme2003]

agreed, portfolio screening is usually a part of their presentation. but, not in the manner ruth had presented herself. her porfolio screening, in my view, was an onslaught of images. overkill. probably to make up for unable to speak.

Agreed upon what you've mentioned. But if no/very few pictures where showed. I think most people don't really know what their field of pictures really are.

 

[enghong17]

i cannot imagine that NUS ps actually featured ruth soh(in much bigger font size and prominence relative to the other two speakers) in their postcard promotional material. no one screen her in advance? as someone said 'she cannot speak!'.

Hi reachme2003,

We had 3 different postcards, did u see all of them? or just Ruth's?

Ruth is chinese educated. We had an extremely hard time convincing her to present in English, especially in front of such a high crowd. Not to mention that she turned down a job offer worth a normal salaryman's few month pay to speak today.

I thought her presentation of pictures just about covered everything in her portfolio, other than the backstage pictures.

The time constrains given to all the speakers cannot be helped. This is a seminar, not a workshop. We could have a 4 hour workshop but it would not benefit students as they will only be learning one topic and defeating the purpose of introducing all genres of professional photography.

EngHong

 

[Spectrum]

agreed, portfolio screening is usually a part of their presentation. but, not in the manner ruth had presented herself. her porfolio screening, in my view, was an onslaught of images. overkill. probably to make up for unable to speak.

Yah, maybe that's her point. Who knows. :think: Anyway, I think she's better in shooting than talking. Go Ruth go...

 

[Spectrum]

Hi reachme2003,

We had 3 different postcards, did u see all of them? or just Ruth's?

Ruth is chinese educated. We had an extremely hard time convincing her to present in English, especially in front of such a high crowd. Not to mention that she turned down a job offer worth a normal salaryman's few month pay to speak today.

I thought her presentation of pictures just about covered everything in her portfolio, other than the backstage pictures.

The time constrains given to all the speakers cannot be helped. This is a seminar, not a workshop. We could have a 4 hour workshop but it would not benefit students as they will only be learning one topic and defeating the purpose of introducing all genres of professional photography.

EngHong

Do keep us informed if Ruth plans to have a workshop. Thank you in advance.

 

[reachme2003]

i have no interest on underwater photography or photojournalism. I only have one postcard which featured ruth soh prominently as a seminar speaker. i am not complaining about lack of pictures from her. as a matter of my opinion, it was too much pictures. way, way not enough talk. if she were handicapped as an english speaker, why was it not highlighted in your promotional materials? even as a mandarin speaker, her skill in tackling q & a was far from desired. her sharing was zero.

if i were in your shoe, i would have consulted the views of your patron and honorary advisors first.

Hi reachme2003,

We had 3 different postcards, did u see all of them? or just Ruth's?

Ruth is chinese educated. We had an extremely hard time convincing her to present in English, especially in front of such a high crowd. Not to mention that she turned down a job offer worth a normal salaryman's few month pay to speak today.

I thought her presentation of pictures just about covered everything in her portfolio, other than the backstage pictures.

The time constrains given to all the speakers cannot be helped. This is a seminar, not a workshop. We could have a 4 hour workshop but it would not benefit students as they will only be learning one topic and defeating the purpose of introducing all genres of professional photography.

EngHong

 

[enghong17]

if i were in your shoe, i would have consulted the views of your patron and honorary advisors first.

What made you think we didn't.

The method of presentation was left to the speakers to allow them freedom to do whatever they wished.

For a first timer in front of such a crowd, i though she did ok.

Btw, she did want to do a studio sharing session but we did not have time for her.

EngHong

 

[reachme2003]

I attended the seminar for the sole purpose of listening to ruth's. that was why i turned up at about slightly after 3 pm when i managed to catch bob's.

your last para is transparent to me. btw, since you did not scheduled for it in your program, why bring it up?

What made you think we didn't.

The method of presentation was left to the speakers to allow them freedom to do whatever they wished.

For a first timer in front of such a crowd, i though she did ok.

Btw, she did want to do a studio sharing session but we did not have time for her.

EngHong

 

[jkl]

enghong, :thumbsup: nicely explained!
:cheergal:

 

[sym18]

i have no interest on underwater photography or photojournalism. I only have one postcard which featured ruth soh prominently as a seminar speaker. i am not complaining about lack of pictures from her. as a matter of my opinion, it was too much pictures. way, way not enough talk. if she were handicapped as an english speaker, why was it not highlighted in your promotional materials? even as a mandarin speaker, her skill in tackling q & a was far from desired. her sharing was zero.

if i were in your shoe, i would have consulted the views of your patron and honorary advisors first.

If i were i your shoes, i wont attend the seminar in the first place if i have no interest in 2 of the 3 topics. But i thought today's seminar was not too bad, given the fact that it is not easy to even get all the speakers down to give a speech. Try organising one and you will know. Well done NUSPS.

 

[ziedrich]

from what enghong said, the speaker made great efforts to turn up and attempt to make the best out of the situation.

if you feel unhappy, so be it, but not everyone feel the same way as you do. i rather enjoyed the seminars. it's over, if some aspects could be better, i'm sure the montage staff will take some of the views into consideration.

there's really no need to keep harping on it. :light:

 

[enghong17]

Do keep us informed if Ruth plans to have a workshop. Thank you in advance.

Will let Ruth Know.

EngHong

 

[reachme2003]

if she is planning a technical workshop, i be interested. if, as a speaker, thank you, i do not want to attend again.

Will let Ruth Know.

EngHong

 

[Yezrah]

Feedback from a secondary school student I brought to the seminar: Boring. So, I have to do the explaining of why he feels that way to him? Anyway, my feedback for Tony Wu's talk is good, except that it starts to get a bit boring also somewhere in the middle. He kept mentioning the names of the marine life in the sea and how many of us actually knows them and how many of us actually remembers their names after the seminar?

Bob Lee's talk is entertaining. Though his shots were probably not as heavily invested as compared to the other two photographers, but he managed to share with us his working experience as a photojournalist.

Ruth's pictures are what most of us actually want perhaps. Big bucks involved and heavy planning. A pity she just show her pictures without much explaining. Wrong audience perhaps. Her pictures are probably more relevant to art directors and her clients. I would prefer to hear from her what goes on behind the scene, rather than showing me all her nice pictures.

I tried explaining to my secondary school mentee that they are PHOTOGRAPHERS. Not school teachers who can present well. Not sure if he gets the point.

 

[Yjx]

I think Tony presented very well, and he tries his best to get us interested with names of marine animals and their interesting character.
Although it is not as interesting to some, but i think he shared sufficient info and techniques abt underwater photography with us.

Bob of course was very entertaining. I agree the photos were not as impactful, but nevertheless, he managed to engage most of the audience, and let us know more abt photojournalism.

Ruth had an engaging porfolio screening, then Q & A. I think she has put in effort to answer the questions and was fairly insightful with her answers. It is not as terrible as it seems, but of course it could have been better.

We all would hope it to be better right? But no one is perfect, and still a learning process for some.

 

[reachme2003]

you will agree that those who are interested in ruth's works, we are not there only to see her portfolio. speaker needs to share their work experience, challenges, behind the scene stories, etc. after all, she had 18 years of experience behind her.

if we wanted to see her portfolio, we can do it online. no need to see her in person.

 

[Einstein]

She did said she planned to have a speech but thats cut out in chinese. Seeing how bob conversed both in chinese and english I would have thought she wouldnt want that.

kudos to the organisers. I love the seminar. Clearly not everyone feels the same way as you do dude. Just because of your disagreement over a particular speaker gives you no right to flame the event, the organisers, and ruth herself. This is degrading.

I think enghong has done a good job explaining. :thumbsup:

 

[enghong17]

Dear all,

The purpose of keeping this tread alive is to provide a means of feedback from the public so that we can improve on the Montage series of events. We take feedback seriously as it is the only way to for us to better enrich the knowledge of fellow budding photographers.

There are some questions which you can help us by providing answers to.

1. Would you prefer a series of say 3 workshops which may be limited to say 50 photogs in a small classroom in an LT in NUS or a 1 day seminar in a centralised location at Suntec. Take into condsideration that the exhibition area at suntec which was one of the main reasons why many photographers want their photos exhibited is included in the package when we book the venue for the seminar. Meaning, no seminar at suntec, no exhibition in a prominent area in town. It also means travelling down all the way to NUS for a workshop at slightly cheaper rates or may be the same as we may need to cater for meals if the workshop lasts a whole day.

2. Would you like to attend an event for with 3/4/5 different photographers sharing all sorts of different photography or just 1 workshop on one particular genre. Note that this would rule out introducation of many types of photography like underwater.

3. Would you prefer the montage competition to remain a competition like this year or a mass exhibition like last year, where there are fewer prizes.

4. Would you prefer a theme, general/specific for the competition.

5. Would you prefer we limit each photographer to say a maximum of 5 images submitted if we were to have digital judging. We have alot of images to judge this year because it had unlimited submission and some people were complaining jugdes were to tired to have a proper look at their images towards the end.

6. Should we stick purely to cater to the school crowd in the competition and seperate the categories even more finely, as some feel that the tiertary crowd is keeping out the younger group of students from JC and secondary schools from winning prizes.

7. Would you prefer digital judging or judging using prints. we prefered prints as the submission medium as people would put more effort into selecting their images as it cost more to send in prints than just pure digital images in cds but it turns out that we still get low quality pictures in print.

Your input will be taken into consideration for the preparation for the next montage.

Thank you.

EngHong

 

[LittleWolf]

The purpose of keeping this tread alive is to provide a means of feedback from the public so that we can improve on the Montage series of events.

I could offer some comments on the exhibition which I attended today, if that helps ...

1) About half of the pictures were mounted at eye level - the other half way too high. So one has the choice to look at them either from an oblique angle, or from far away. It is difficult to appreciate the pictures this way.

2) Many of the exhibited inkjet prints had screaming, oversaturated colours that looked more like a Walt Disney cartoon on LSD than a photograph. It is hard to believe that the judges would have chosen these pictures if they originally had these colours.

3) The labels next to the pictures not only had obnoxious advertising for the event's main sponsor on them (can't the advertising stuff be at least somewhat smaller than the name of the photographer and the title of the picture?), but were full of typos. Easy to avoid with minimum effort and, therefore, very embarrassing.

I don't want to sound like I'm nit-picking. If the contributors are expected to give their best in terms of pictures, one should also expect the organizers to put a convincing effort into the exhibition. I've got no doubts that a lot of people were working very hard behind the scenes, but the main thing that counts in an art exhibition is the exhibits and how they are presented.

 

[enghong17]

Hi littlewolf,

Thank you for your feedback.

1. We have space constrains at Suntec which only has about 70+ panals. If we want to put up 100 pictures, we would have to do a two floor layout. It would be ideal to have all the prints at eye level but quite hard unless we cut the number of exhibits to half the number, which is what we do not want to do.

2. We tried to get exactly the same colour as the original prints, some of the prints are not as vivid as the originals. Also some colours may be too vivid, but with 1 sponsor and 1 A3 printer, there is only that much we can do using photoshop. Some of the prints were adjusted with the photographer standing behind my com member editing the photograph and they decided that the edited ones look better then their originals so they asked us to print as what they saw on the screens.

3. Any organizer of an event would know that sponsor recognition is unavoidable. Without sponsors, there would be not prints or exhibition. Well, they did sponsor us all the paper and ink, not to mention the printer we have at the DMC, i do not see why we should not recognise them on the labels. Agreed the Photographers names should be more prominent. Can you point to me the spelling errors so i can change the labels.

I thought my team was nitpicking, ha aparently we did not nitpick enough........ :embrass:

 

[kenshinz]

As far as I could remember the only errors we've noticed, was that of Eng Hong's name (but since it was Eng Hong's, we figured he wouldn't really mind since it was noticed rather late), and the other one was following the original photographer's title entry, since we couln't be sure if it was purposely spelled that way(couldn't contact in the photographer in time, as original media was submitted through snail mail very late), we left it as it is.