Meeting Report

Judge Don Mitchell ARPS

Don judged this competition with his normal good humour, announcing at the start that he didn't like Portrait, Landscape, Natural History or for that matter any other genre of photography except steam locomotives. Don revealed he has been judging for over 40 years and is currently the President of Bognor Regis Camera Club. The confidence of Don to mark images as seen and not 'Hold Back' any is his testament to those 40 years of judging. With both the PI & Print Best of the Year competitions to be judged we had a lot to get through. It didn't help that the software crashed on the second image marked and it took several minutes to recover the situation. As it happened, judging ended ahead of schedule confirming that experienced judges are excellent time keepers as well.

Meeting Report

Just as judging is a personal view, so is report writing, and the authors assessment of the competition. In my humble opinion Don Mitchell was in top form judging our prints and projected images, with concise critiques of each picture focussing on technical detail and composition rather than the common trait we have experienced from some judges of lengthy descriptions of the content of the picture.

The marking could be described as harsh, but this after all was Best of Year, and there were considerable variations from the original score a print received to that received in this competition, which either reveals that our earlier judges were to say the least generous, or that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I leave you to be the Judges of that.

The winner this year was Daisy Kane with her “Hot Air Balloon”. Don said that of all the competitions he has judged this year, this picture would always stand out as one of the best. High and well deserved praise indeed. How Daisy is going to follow this years success I don’t know, at least for photographers like myself the only way is up!

Meeting Report

We had a really interesting evening withb Roy Hales and his wife Angela who gave us a presentation about the wildlife in Borneo.

Their particular hobby is the study of spiders and the rainforest in Borneo has a lot of different varieties including some brand new ones not before seen or therefore named.

They keep a huge collection in pots in a room in their house with dozens of specimins and look after and study them. They  also run the British Tarantula Spider Society.

Roy's interest in spiders started when he was a boy when he found himself looking at a spider in its web (rather like Robert the Bruce) and he thought how beautiful and clever 'the little critter' was and so his lifetime hobby began. Then he met his future wife on a trip when she was studying tarantulas in some far of spot (most probably Borneo) and love and the spiders blossomed and have done so ever since.

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.)

Meeting Report

I have belatedly been asked to write this report as both our Print and PI secretaries are away on holiday - lucky devils missing all this gloomy weather!

Our old friend Eric Burchell (steam engine enthusiast) judged this competition for us in his own experienced style giving mostly quite high marks. There were Four 20s; Eight 19s; and Fifteen 18s out of a total entry of 54 PIs.

The overall best P I of the evening was awarded to Anne Nagle for her 'Parental Duties' which was a wonderful shot of a mother Tern with a small fish in its beak for its waiting baby which was screaming its head off as they do. Very well done Anne. Anne is currently second in this annual competition.

Second was Charmaine Hayes' 'Land Speed Record' - a picture of a couple of children tearing down a path on their toboggan clearly really enjoying themselves, and third was my picture of two male Fallow deer having a go at each other during 'The Rut'.

The final 20 went to Tim Hulbert's 'Crash landing' which was of a Hawk just landing back on its perch with its wings outstretched. A wonderful moment of 'action' captured expertly. Tim carried out the projection duties during the evening without any trouble at all which I thought worthy of a special mention since, as far as I know, he had never done anything like this ever before. Well done Tim on both scores.