Many camera clubs have adapted to the COVID-19 restrictions by using the Zoom application to replace their club face-to-face meetings.  In addition, some clubs are using Zoom for their in-club photo competitions.

The Zoom application is a convenient conferencing application but there are some negative aspects to its use as a method for judges to view and score images.

The quality of images projected via the Zoom application is impacted/degraded by external factors from the Zoom host’s computer to a participant’s computer.  One primary factor is the internet bandwidth available to the Zoom host and individual participants.  Therefore, three judges viewing the same image may not receive the optimal quality of the original image.

To ensure the highest quality for an image to be judged, we are suggesting that a club’s judging panel be provided access to the competition images by one of the following methods:

• forward all the images to the judging panel via WETRANSFER or DROPBOX. The judges will score them on their own computers.
• load the images on the club’s online competition system and have the judges view/score them on their own computer
• Clubs that are currently using Visual Pursuits have the ability to provide direct access to the images for online judging within the Visual Pursuits environment. The judge views the image on their own computer monitor and enters the score directly into the Visual Pursuits system. During a club meeting in Zoom to view the images and scores, the best viewing environments to show the images directly from a Gallery in Visual Pursuits rather than
  from the Image Competition Manager software on a laptop.

It may be more appropriate to use a Zoom session for the judges when presenting the winning images and discussing the outstanding features on select images.