Our old friend (not in years!) Walter came to judge our leg of the Southern Federation PI competition. Each club taking part gets a judge to mark all the entries in their league and then all the totals from all the other clubs who hold similar meetings are added up for the final result. We have not been doing very well.
The first thing that Walter commented on was the lack of titles being revealed for some very silly reason. It makes the job of the judge that little bit harder and does not always help the authors of the images as we will see later.
Our first entry was Charmain Hayes' 'Out of the darkness' which is a striking image of her Son. Walter liked it and awarded 8.5 marks (which proved a popular mark for us!).
Next was Peter Michell's 'Finishing touches' which also got 8.5; but Walter was confused by the hair on the left hand side of the image not realising that the lady was looking into a mirror doing her make up. The title might have helped him.
Ian MacWhirter's 'Polar Bear courting behaviour' also got 8.5. it was much admired but Walter would have 'cooled the image down' a bit by adding a bit of blue to make the snow and ice colder.
Paul Hayward's 'How long to cave in?' got another 8.5; Martin Tomes 'Mountain Sunset' got an 8; Liz's 'This feels nice' got anothe 9, so she was our star of the evening; and finally Terence Birmingham's 'Power Struggle' got 8.5 giving us a grand total of 68.5 marks and giving us 4th place out of 5 clubs.
A gentleman had come all the way from Hungerford to see his club come first with 70.5 marks. Well done to them.
We all enjoyed the evening because Walter says exactly what he thinks of each image and why and is most entertaining whilst doing that.
Thank you Walter. We hope to see you again quite soon.