2021 Honours Update By Bruce Gidwood FPSNZ Chair PSNZ Honours Board
THE HONOURS BOARD would like to congratulate all PSNZ members who will be awarded PSNZ Honours this year. We are delighted to see the increased success rates relative to the previous five year average and hope it is related to the extensive education programme we initiated this year. Honour
% successful 5yr 2021 average Licentiate Print 86% 68% Licentiate Digital 65% 59% Associate Print 42% 34% Associate Digital 29% 24% Fellowship Print 75% 19% Fellowship Digital 0% 17% We held a Q&A webinar for each honour category in October 2020. Each session was recorded and made available on the PSNZ website for reference by all prospective applicants. We will do it again this year! In the 2020/21 year we focused our education on what it takes to make a diverse set that flows as a portfolio for the Licentiate and in particular the Associate. As a result, we saw more emphasis on greater diversity in the Associate applications. We are pleased that our message that an Associate is an advanced Licentiate and not a mini Fellowship seems to have been heard. This has been a stumbling block in the past and we are very happy to see a great step up in success rates, relative to the previous five-year average. I chaired my second Honours Board this year and we welcomed Ann Bastion FPSNZ EFIAP MFIAP onto the Board. On Wednesday afternoon we met to induct Ann, to refresh ourselves on the honours guidelines and make sure we all agreed on our approach to the assessment.
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Our objective was, as always, to take a positive approach to the assessment and to be as consistent as we could be. We agreed to take all the time we needed to assess submissions and to talk whenever we needed to. The Honours Board developed a great vibe very quickly and we worked well together to assess your portfolios. We had many deep discussions about your work and in the end we all felt comfortable that we had been consistent and that your successes reflected a good standard, respected our existing and past Honours holders and rewarded good photography. We do not believe we raised the bar; we sought to reward those that demonstrated broad skills in photographic craft for the Licentiate level, broad based advanced skills in the Associate and mastery of photographic art at the Fellowship level. Once again the Licentiate applicants wowed us with their range of skills. Consistent with the guidelines, we looked for the demonstration of photographic craft in a diverse, cohesive set demonstrating your ability in a range of situations such as lighting, environment, genre and camera settings. Overall we felt that the applicants had a pretty good grasp of the guidelines and were doing well to put cohesive sets together. For the Associate, we looked for the same but at an advanced level. Overall, despite the better success rate this year, we feel that many Associate submissions did not show an understanding of the basics of photography and post processing. This year we will focus our education programme on what it takes to step up from a Licentiate to an Associate. We have also noticed over the years that people who have already achieved their Licentiate are more likely to be successful at the Associate. We would strongly recommend that applicants start with the Licentiate before attempting the Associate.
