We arrived at Lancing Parish Hall for the Crouch Shield PI competition which was hosted by Worthing CC. We paid, bought raffle tickets, as you do, and had a large 'goody bag' thrust upon us containing Olympus catalogues, a very useful lens polishing cloth and very luckily a pen, since I immediately found out that my own pen had expired. We then met up with fellow SCC supporters, I counted eleven, and sat down.
Then proceedings began and we were introduced to the Judge, Marcus Scott-Taggart from Surrey, who is very experienced. He trains judges and checks them out 'in the field'. He started by telling us that all the images entered were very good, but that it was his job to judge harshly in order to separate them from one another to pick the winners.
There were eleven clubs entered, so Six rounds of eleven images. Our first image was 'Red Hot Chilli Pepper' taken by Liz Barber and Marcus remarked on what a very good job had been done setting up and taking the image and gave it 18, which gave us 2nd equal position.
In Round Two, Daisy Kane's great image of a dog enjoying a drink from a water bottle entitled 'Ah, Bliss' got 16 and, as with a great number of images during the evening, Marcus thought that some heavy cropping was required. The best image of the evening was seen during this round of a Man and his Son looking through a showroom window at a Motorbike, entitled 'Boys and Toys' and was taken by a lady from Chichester CC. This put them 2nd equal again with us. These first two rounds were our finest!
Round Three was a great disappointment to us all as Marcus was not happy with a couple of issues with Ray Foxley's 'Quiet Time'. Ray is one of our great new talents in the club, especially with BW images. Again he said it needed cropping and should have had a white key line round it to separate it from the black screen onto which it was projected; He gave a very disappointing 15 for an image that we all like a lot. This gave us 6th position.
At the break, we were all tucking into our drinks and biscuits when suddenly out of the blue a girl shouted out a number and the a raffle has started. The ticket was Pink 306 and when I had managed to retrieve my tickets from my wallet, I found that I had Pink 305! Anyway, it all ended very happily when we discovered that Paul Hayward was the lucky winner of a voucher for £100.
Then on with Round Four, and the first image up was Ian MacWhirter's 'Amazon Wood Stork'. This was praised for the bird flying level, but only given16 points as there was a very small dark area under its eye with no detail. However we rose back up to 5th. The chap showing the scores after each round flashed them up for a matter of seconds making it quite impossible to see what position we were all at, I have calculated our positions later!
Round Five started again with Jean MacWhirter's image 'Snow Bunting singing' which got a worthy 18, which delighted Jean as she got a higher mark than Ian. We then rose to 4th position.
In the final round, Martin Tomes image 'Dave Stradwick' sadly did not impress Marcus who clearly was not a jazz fan and it got 15, which finally put us in 6th position with 99 points, a great improvement on last year when we were last.
The winners were our friends at Steyning who got 108 points with some really very good images beating Chichester by 2 points, with Bognor third with 105. Only four 20s were awarded, Chichester getting two of them and Steyning none.
We were treated to some really fine pictures during the evening which we all enjoyed, and hopefully will have learnt from. The winning clubs have more than twice our number of members and attract some very good photographers. However, we are a small but happy bunch of people who all enjoy our photography.