FOTOWEEKDC - My submission experience

I completely forgot about the FOTOWEEKDC deadline, and got the reminder email just in time.

The image selection process
I spent Monday night scouring through my images, and settled on 4 to submit. Ok, so it wasn't that easy to do. I wanted to submit a personal essay on my trip to Honduras, but wasn't able to pull a story out the images i wanted to use. This, for me, is my biggest problem. I do really well with taking individually strong images, but I am sort of lacking in the storytelling realm and putting a set of images together as one body. It's a problem I also have with writing =) Once I came to this conclusion, I decided it would be better to do just individual images, and submitted one fine art image, and three landscapes. I've never thought of myself as particularly strong at or interested in landscapes, but I seem to take a lot of them now for my personal work.

Pro or Amateur?
After 2 hours I've finally picked my final images. Now I'm hustling to resize and label my images, and for some reason or another start looking at the rules of the competition. I was ready to enter as a professional, but according to FOTOWEEKDC (and I wonder if this is true across the board), a professional is someone who makes 50% or higher of their living from photography. Hm, not so much an adequate description for me, so I entered as an amateur. I'm not really sure how I feel about being labeled as an amateur, but whatever.

My wallet
So my submissions made it in just minutes before the midnight cutoff when I see that the deadline has been extended to September. All that rushing! But no worries, I was able to submit mine at the original fee of $10/image, whereas now it's $15. That's $20 in my pocket for the next competition fee.

Expectations and Judges
I'm not sure what my expectations are for this competition. This is the first time in 7 years that I've competed; the first was in about 2000 when I sent some work into Photo Review, of which Kathy Ryan of the NYT Magazine was head judge. I was disappointed of course that I didn't win or even get a mention, but it was then that I realized how important it is to study the judges of the competition. All the images that were successful were very photo-journalistic and documentary in style, whereas mine were definitely abstract and fine arts-based. I did take a quick glance at the judges of FOTOWEEKDC; most are gallerists or curators, photogs or editors, and for the most part all are involved in commercial photography.

I have no idea how my images will be received. I love them, but will the judges?