New Clickers October 2019

There was a packed room for the Keyworth Camera Club “New Clickers” session held at the Parochial Church Hall prior to the full club meeting tonight.

The topic for presentation and discussion was an introduction to the world of competition judging, how it works and what judges were looking for when assessing images.

David Kissman introduced the session by suggesting that New Clickers members should now be more familiar with the operation of their respective cameras and it was now time for the group to move onwards in their journey to become even better photographers by understanding more about how to produce better images by studying what judges are looking for in competitions. He added that the criteria that they use would be just as useful to the club photographer who simply wants to take better images.

Malcolm Sales, a member of the club but also an experienced judge, talked about the key differences between judging for a club competition and the marking system that is the precursor to acceptances for exhibitions. He explained that club judging allows more time for examination of an image or print and this leads to some serious scrutiny of many aspects of the image. This was to be in contrast to the rapidity of marking the very much larger number of images entered into exhibitions where the judges might only have matter of seconds to rate each picture. This required the image to have immediate impact and clarity.

David then went on to talk about the 12 most commonly used criteria that serve as a template for assessing the quality of an image. These included, technical excellence, lighting, impact, composition, story telling, creativity and style. He showed some examples of the errors that are commonly made including over or under cropping, failure to remove distractions and the need to avoid or remove burned out elements from images.

The was just enough time for a few penetrating questions from the members that were dealt with by Malcolm and David before the session came to a close……with many more questions still to be answered!