Thirty members submitted images for the fourth and final Round of our annual competition, judged by Rosemary Wilman, Hon. FRPS, via Zoom Video Conferencing on Tuesday 2nd March.
Rosemary began by praising the entries overall as a very interesting and varied collection, demonstrating a high degree of imagination in tackling the theme. In judging competitions, she looks out for signs of creativity and likes to acknowledge the input that the photographer adds in creating an image, and she found plenty of those qualities in our submissions.
Whilst adopting a broad view of the theme, Rosemary did mark down one or two submissions where she thought that the subject was just too general or “stretching” it too far. She noted that titles of images were helpful in highlighting the connection to the theme.
Rosemary liked some of the creative touches that members displayed, both in terms of the composition of the picture, for example using an unusual viewpoint or angle, and also in the processing, such as use of somewhat unnatural colours
Using the screen, she was able to suggest possible crops to eliminate redundant areas of an image, and to highlight distracting elements – objects, bright areas, jarring colours - that might have best been avoided in the shot, or mitigated in the processing.
We were advised to think about how to make the subject of our pictures stand out where the background is so complicated or detailed as to become a distraction. She acknowledged that in some situations, such as “action” shots this might be impossible, if there is no time to change position or wait for distracting elements to be resolved.
A few images were criticised for apparent “over-processing”, especially where this resulted in visible “haloes” around objects in the frame, whether through applying sharpening or other effects.
Rosemary advised us to think about how our images would be displayed. Our digital images are displayed against a black background – both on screen or when projected in a darkened auditorium - so we should consider including “key lines” or borders to distinguish the edge of the images from the surrounding display.
A number of images were held back for a second look and these achieved the highest marks on a scale up to 20. Of these, maximum scores were recorded by:
- Hilary Barton, for “All aboard the Lisbon Tram”
- Jean Jameson, for “Thames view”
- Alan Larsen, for “Shoeburyness Boom”
- Rob Wilkinson, for “Looking Up, Looking Down”
Their images are included here.
You can see all the entries in the newest Gallery on our website.
We are planning to provide an opportunity for members to share comments on their own and each other’s entries, as we did after the earlier Rounds. As soon as we have set up that platform, we’ll let you know.
The Results of the Session and the cumulative totals for the whole Season 2020/21 will be circulated by email to all members, and will also be accessible from the Internal Competitions Page of the Society Website.
We are hopeful that by the time our next Competition Season is under way, we will be back in our familiar meeting place, in which case we ought to be able to admire prints again as well as digital images.
Please keep an eye on the Website for more information closer to the date.