Statistically, the vast majority of voters and photographers tend not
to submit comments during voting. At this point, I'm somewhat on the fence
as to whether comments are useful or not. For my part, I think I've received
very few comments that did not point out an obvious technical/compositional
oversight. The most useful comments came from those who broke down their
vote into components (like autool), even though the breakdown is subjective.
I would guess that most consider that all the useful information they wish
to give is contained entirely in the vote they assign and it is left to the
photographer to interpret the results.
Another problem with voting in general is that some people think that a
10 should only ever be used for the absolutely best damn photo they have
every seen in their life. Others feel they should use the entire scale,
assigning a 10 to the best submission that week. The only useful information
voting yields is the ordering, not the actual score itself; this is not
currently refelected in the system. Most of the time, the winning entry
(or entries) do not win by a statistically significant margin, so it's
really just baseball with cameras when average scores are presented.
My exercise this week is to comment on every submission for which I vote.
I have no intention of voting on every photo and I'm voting on them in
the order in which I see them. I'm not writing "neat but you should
have done " comments. Hopefully, I'm providing meaningful, even if not
always entirely critical, comments. I want the photographer to know that
I did not look at their photo for all of five seconds before assigning
it some value.
So far, the exercise has been fruitful. I have discovered that a photo
which I did not particularly like at first glance had other -- not necessarily
quantifiable -- properties which I did like. My final vote for each image is
now almost always higher than my first impression score.
By voting & commenting with consideration on random photos, I'm finding
the experience all the more enjoyable.
Ironically, I've received fewer comments for my current submission (4 of 181)
than for my previous two submissions (39 of 320, 9 of 232). |
