Last night we were pleased to welcome Mary Gibson to judge the first competition of our season. Mary is a member of Carluke Camera Club, and had driven 85 miles to be with us. On this occasion, of course, the hat she wore was not of CCC but the SPF (Scottish Photographic Federation), as she gave us the benefit of her experience in her assessment of our digital competition entries.
We like to invite visiting judges to show us some of their own work before they talk through ours. We find this gives us a better sense of where their eye is at, and helps us understand some of the thinking behind the comments they make. Whilst retaining her interest and knowledge in nature, animals and motorbike sports, these days Mary leans towards ‘creative’ photography, which has been brought her considerable success in competitions.
Our own competition itself was notable for several features. The Main Cup ranks the photographers for consistency, based on the combined score of three images. And in this case Mary has 93 images to address, which must be a PPS record in modern times, and which put a bit of a strain on the programme for the evening in general, and on the tea break in particular. This is not such a bad state of affairs – keep those entries coming in! Mary particularly highlighted matters of compositional strength in how photographers had handled various scenes and how the eye flows around the frame; and if the limits of time meant Mary wasn’t able to say a huge amount about each image, at least we’ve all had a chance to see each other’s work and can discuss it amongst ourselves afterwards.
As usual, we’ve got the winning entries on our Galleries page.