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.
There was a good number of entriesto this set subject, and a very high standard of varied images. Most were black and whites, but there were a few sepias, although one of mine was a “false orangey colour” in our judge’s words, so take care out there next time round! The main advice was to think whether the toning added or subtracted from the image. With just a couple of the entries, he would have liked to see the colour version, as he felt that converting to black and white doesn’t always work.
This evening we had our second 'Knockout' competition devised and run by John Gauvin, ably assisted by Alex. Last season we had our first similar competition using prints from everyone entering. This time it was three PIs and 69 were entered. Two images were projected side by side on the screen and we voted with a show of hands with our choice of the best image. Alex counted the votes and if there were an equal number of votes for each image, Alex settled the result with the toss of a coin,(a £1 before the break and a 5p after_ the tea must have cost a lot!)
I always look forward to having these SCPF P.I. competition rounds held at our venue, because one can get nice and close to the images and hear exactly what the judge is saying, where as if similar comps are held in their usual necessary big halls you can miss quite a lot sometimes.
Martin gave us a talk on last year’s 'One a Week’ project which a number of us took part in during 2013. The idea is that you are given a new topic each week and you must take at least one image of the subject during that week, which you then upload to the Flickr site. Once there, your fellow members of the group can tell you what they think of your efforts. If you get no comments, as happened with most of my shots, you can take it that nobody thinks them worthy of comment! Not good, but in my case predictable.
