AIPP Silver Lining Awards winners announced

6 August 2020

The Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP) has recently announced the winners of their inaugural Silver Lining Awards. The competition, created to "help fill the COVID-19 void", replaces the State Awards and the APPAs. Given the restrictions earlier in the year, and those currently in place in Victoria, the organisation’s usual print-based competitions were going to be impossible.

Different to other online competitions, the AIPP devised additional elements to help make the experience for members educational, motivational, and inspirational. One example of this saw members being given the opportunity to submit images for pre-entry critique by experienced judges, with the feedback they received enabling them to fine-tune their images prior to submission. As well as this, entry categories were organised under two broad headings: Classic - images with a more traditional approach created entirely in-camera and with limited subsequent editing and Creative - which allows for the full scope of digital editing techniques to be employed.

“The idea was, quite literally, to create a ‘silver lining’ out of the current situation,” explained Tony Hewitt, Chair of the AIPP Awards Committee.

“We wanted not only to give members a creative outlet at a time when many wouldn’t have much work, but also make the whole experience much more beneficial professionally for everybody who entered. At the same time, we wanted everybody to have a bit of fun. And it worked brilliantly; the response has been massive with 3,000 entries, from which we selected 300 semi-finalists and then 120 finalists, ten in each of the categories.”

While the AIPP raised a prize pool valued at $45,000, efforts were made to do something a little different in relation to prizes, so in addition to imaging products, the prizes also included workshops and mentoring sessions with some of Australia’s leading professional photographers. Hewitt emphasised that it was a deliberate decision not to award an overall grand prize – as happens in the AIPP’s regular Australian Professional Photography Awards – and instead the accolades were evenly distributed, including awarding the first five places in each category.