Club News

Our first meeting of the season was very successful mainly because of the very encouraging number of new members who signed up to join us. Jane Coward nearly wore her pen out writing receipts. We have sadly lost two members to our friends at Steyning. Tim and Clive both felt that they would get more of what they want for their photography at Steyning which is a bigger club and offers more workshops and speakers. Both of them had committee jobs at Storrington and we are very grateful for all the work that they did for us.

Saturday dawned quite brightly but by lunch time dark and threatening clouds were very much in evidence and the Chairman person was visibly twitching in case she had to dash out and bring all the seat cushions indoors.

The evening started with the presentationof the cups for last year's competitions.

Walter Benzie, having giving a talk earlier in the season,came back to adjudicate the 'Best of the Year' for both Prints and PI's, with Martin taking the Print title and Paul taking PI.

At his suggestion we allowed Walter to allocate 1st, 2nd, 3rd and Highly Commended in this competition, rather than our normal method of allocating points, feeling that it was right in this contest as there is no league positions to be contested.

Print Competition

The third and final PI competition of the season was judged by John Lynch. This was the first time John had judged one of our competition and it was fascinating to see another style of judging.

For some time (years), I have been suggesting to successive fixture secretaries that I have a friend in Arundel who is a Theatre photographer who had said to me that he would come to camera club and give a talk on his work. This always fell on deaf ears.

However, we had a spare slot and Chairperson Di said “what about your friend Mike Eddowes filling the void?” And so I arranged it.

We held our judged by the members panels evening again this year. We don't get a judge in, everyone present is given a peice of paper and required to score each panel as it is shown.

Putting a panel together isn't about picking your three best images and presenting them all at once, it is about finding three images which work well together. That might mean similar shapes or colours or some other unifying theme.

This was our first photographic show for the general public (in my time in the club, and not including county competitions) but as we had recently hosted a couple of these, we were well versed in how to set things up. The event was at Pulborough Village Hall.

However, what gave us concern was whether we would be able to attract enough people to make the whole exercise work for us as a fund raising event.

Another of the club’s old friends, Walter Benzie ARPS cameto give us a talk on how and why he went about getting his Royal Photographic Society distinctions. Walter is a member of Guildford Camera Club and said he very much likes coming to SCC as we were the first club at which he judged a competition, we in turn like him coming to either judge or talk as he has such a relaxed, honest and straight up way of talking, which is also very amusing and downright funny.

This event was held on 13th March at Hailsham and was hosted by Rottingdean and Lewes CC. An almost capacity audience enjoyed the ensuing battle between the 22 clubs that had entered. Liz Boud judged the 110 prints with competence, good humour and consistency, few if any authors could have felt unjustly treated. Storrington's fortunes fluctuated by the round, at one time it looked as if we were heading towards the lead, but we ended equal 7th with our usual rivals Steyning. The surprise in the results was Chichester CC at next to bottom - they are used to being at or very near the top.