AIPP Master of Photography – Ken Drake
At the recent Australian Professional Photography Awards (APPAs), I entered 4 photos (the allowed number) into the Portrait category and scored 2 Silver with Distinction medals, 1 Silver Medal and one Certificate of Attainment. As a result of these scores and my scores over the last few years, I have been given the great honour of being announced as a Master of Photography, which means I can now put new letters after my name ‘M. Photog’. I am extremely proud to have achieved this honour, I have been working towards it for a number of years now. I set myself a goal in 2008 that I would achieve Master of Photography status by only submitting studio based animal photos on our black and white backgrounds, that have come from our commissioned client sessions (i.e. no specially set up sessions with trained animals!) and that I would achieve this in ten years. I am delighted to have achieved this in six years!
So where do I go from here? There isstill so much to achieve! I would dearly love to follow up my Portrait Category Grand Prize at the WPPIs earlier this year with a similar category win at the APPAs, that would be an incredible achievement. Thats now a goal for the next ten years. I will now be setting up special sessions to get these competition photos, as I want to stretch my creative and artistic muscles a little bit more and try new things with our animal art photography. But I will only ever enter animal portraits, as that is what I love to photograph.
We had some other amazing news from this years APPAs, Johnny our Graphic Artist entered for the first time and won a Gold Medal! That is a HUGE achievement for his first time of entering, we are all so proud of him, he is our Golden Johnny. He was also just 1 point from being awarded a Silver Medal for another of his photos, I’m sure next year he will put that right!
I also wanted to mention that I’m not the only ‘Master’ at Zoo Studio, Beck attained her Masters in Business Administration (MBA) over ten years ago, our clients are in such good hands with Beck in charge! Unfortunately the Australian Institute of Professional Photography doesn’t formally recognise excellence in customer service, customer satisfaction or photography business skills with awards, but if they did I just know Beck would win. I know that our clients love her, almost as much as I do.
Ken – M. Photog :-)
