Our baptism of fire

Meeting Report

We co-hosted this competition with Southwick CC. They were responsible for setting up the seating, manning the entrance, making the teas and coffees and running the raffle. Park Cameras sponsored the event and provided some raffle prizes.

We had to advise all the clubs of the event, send them the rules, labels etc and receive all the 21 club's Print entries, sort them into rounds, take them to the Judge for him to mark, collect them again and type up result sheets for all the clubs with the final scores for them to take away. Then all the prints had to be photographed for projection alongside the print presentation box, so that those too far away in the hall could see what the judge was talking about when he marked all 105 prints at the hall on the day. Unfortunately, this was where we fell down a bit as the images were unsharp and very often did not include the whole picture. All this work went on before the event and was carried out by Clive  and Daisy.  (After setting things up, Clive disappeared to the Carribean to get his strength up for the actual day.)

Di Walker headed up the introductions and made all the right noises at the front having taken the judge, Frank Page, a semi retired professional photographer from Staplehurst in Kent, to the pub for lunch with Clive. There was a good bunch of our members to help set up. Martin brought along  a  very good sound system; John Gauvin had the club's projector; and we had to set up tables to display all the entries.  All was going well until a Sussex Fed man came and instead of helping went round telling us all off!

Then we finally started and before long the man from the Fed jumped up and said we should be announcing from which club the prints came from (not in the instuctions given to us by the Fed).

Along the way Frank awarded nine 20s for some really outstanding prints, from which he had to pick out a winner, a lovely sand dune picture called 'Wind Sculpture' by Graham Wilcock from Horsham Photographic Society.

The winning club was Mid Sussex Camera Club with 93 points out of a possible 100 (they got two 20s); Second was Eastbourne Photographic Society with 92; Third was Bognor Regis Camera Club with 90 and Storrington Camera Club did very well coming Fourth with 88 points.

My Golden Eagle with kill got 18; as did Martin Tomes' 'Tranquility'; Next Peter Michell's 'Emma' got a 19. We then had tea break. Afterwards our next print - Ian MacWhirter's 'Grey Wagtail and Reflection' only got 15 ( for being oversharpened) which all the Storrington members totally disagreed with!!; and finally Ian's 'Leverett' got 18 giving us a very good result since the Sussex Fed competitions bring us up against some very strong opponents.

Our thanks must go to Di Walker, Clive, Daisy, Martin, John Gauvin and to Anne Nagle and Jane Coward who gave invaluable assistance.

We have now had the rehearsal, so we can put up a really good show when we host the Regnum Crouch print competition at Steyning in November.