[stevegreen]

Last night I attended my first Camera Club meeting at Wrekin Arts Photographic Club and I really enjoyed it.

The night was centered around a competition between men and women club members and the crowd (maybe 30 strong) were treated to a display of a total of 60 images, each of which were judged by two judges and scored out of 20. As it happens, I knew both of the judges very well as I have been friends with their son since I was about 13, so when I arrived I didn't feel too out of it and was introduced to some of the more prominent members and the Chairman.

First off was the print competition where there were 20 prints displayed and scored by the judges. One thing that immediately struck me about the entries was that there didn't seem to be any particular size format used. Although the print had to be mounted in card to a maximum size of 20”x16” the actual images themselves were all very different sizes and shapes and a lot of them were quite 'arty' in appearance i.e. printed on mottled paper or very soft focused shots, there also seemed to be a lot of 'door' shots.

The slides which were judged next were pretty much the same, just a different format and more uniform in image size. These were projected onto a makeshift roll down screen. Again though, there seemed to be a lot of shots that used soft focus, some of the shots that I thought were excellent were scored low for small composition issues and the main judge in particular seemed quite keen to look at different crops available.

After a cup of tea (30p) we moved onto the digital section and they used a laptop with a digital projector to display the shots. Again, there were 20 entries and these ranged from heavily photoshopped images to entirely unedited images.

Overall, the men won by a narrow margin after quite a lighthearted evening.

I shall definitely be going next week and will be taking along four prints to enter into the next competition. They seemed like a quite friendly bunch and I had quite a long chat with the Chairman after the event relating to competitions and the like.

Overall, i'm really glad that I went last night and will probably spend tomorrow choosing 4 shots to get printed so I can enter into the next competition. They will probably get ripped to bits, but the learning experience is what it's all about.

[cotter]

sounds intresting.. good luck next week... you should post your prints here first for us to crit

[stevegreen]

Good idea, I have them on my Flickr so I will post them in the critique section, then they can be ripped to bit by lots of people