Summer Lockdown Competition Night 1
Thursday 21st of May saw Keyworth Camera Club hold an internal competition over Zoom. The benefits of meetings of any kind being held over the internet means we can invite speakers and judges from much further afield than if we were meeting in person, as travel distances don’t pose a problem anymore. Taking advantage of this we were pleased to book Leigh Woolford AWPF EFIAP DPAGB BPE3 FWPF from Pontypridd, South Wales to cast his critical eye over our images.
Our normal club rules applied to submissions but we only had two categories, colour and monochrome. Members were allowed to enter five images per section. Such was the number of photographs submitted we had to reduce numbers to give Leigh a fighting chance of being able to appraise all the images without running into Friday morning!
Leigh remarked on how strong the overall entries were and stated how much he’d enjoyed looking at the photographs – Leigh had been able to view the pictures before the night of the competition. Our marking system is for a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place image and up to 5 commended in each section. Leigh said he had many contenders for all these positions and went through our entries more than once before he was happy with his final selections.
Leigh’s comments were delivered in an enthusiastic style that wasn’t destructive in any way at all. His observations were encouraging and his suggestions on how some of the images could be improved were thoughtful and inspirational. Leigh also managed to inject some humorous annotations too, which were welcomed by all. One thing that came over well was how much Leigh had agonized over the near misses, of which there were many, with him saying it was such a shame he couldn’t award more, but did add if that had been possible we would have had a very long list of such images.
We would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Leigh for giving us a superb assessment of our photographs and we hope he enjoyed the evening as much as we did.
The two photographs accompanying this report are the winning images from each category. ‘My Ball’ by Rob Inglis taking top position in the colour section and ‘London Fly Past’ by Paul Burrows claiming first place in monochrome. You can see all the awarded images here