G’day, last night I went to the monthly meeting of a camera club to which I belong. The competition for the night was ‘The Colour Yellow’. At the club, you have the option of exhibiting prints on the night for the judge to evaluate, or submit digital entries some time in advance for the judge to evaluate at his leisure before delivering the awards of either Distinction or Credit on the night.

Members are entitled to enter three prints and or three digital entries. I chose to enter three prints.

I entered the yellow chickens which I may have shown previously in a Photo101 blog together with the following two:

In his opening remarks, the judge reminded us that judging photographic images is a pretty subjective exercise as we all have our own prejudices, intrenched opinions and our likes and dislikes. Fair comment too. I’m a qualified camera club judge and I always say exactly the same thing to entrants.

Well, the judging continued apace with the judge awarding Distinctions and Credits to images that took his fancy. On some occasions when he felt an award was not merited, he made a brief comment on where, in his opinion, the image wasn’t worthy of an award. That was excellent because we attend camera club competitions to learn.  Unfortunately for some entrants, the remarks were cursory.

When the judge came to my image of the firefighting bear, he dismissed it with the sole comment, ‘The author of this image should have used the rule of thirds and if the photographer knows nothing about the rule, then I suggest he or she learns it’. Fair comment I guess, but the rules of photography are made to be broken.

Then, the chickens and the egg. Lighting in the wrong place, creating too much brightness in the yellows and the background should be strongly cropped, too much brown and out of focus detail. Again, fair comment.

Then, the bananas in the eucalyptus tree. I nearly burst out laughing when the judge commented that the light on the bananas and the use of too much contrast was making them too yellow, and then awarded the image a Credit on the basis that although it had no photographic merit, it made him laugh.

As I said earlier, we go into camera club competitions to learn. Did I learn anything from this experience?

I certainly did, I now know his likes and dislikes. If I present before him again, I’ll crop my images like mad, obey the rule of thirds to the letter, hold back on the brightness, restrict contrast and try to make him laugh.

Why am I writing this blog. Not to criticise the judge, that’s for sure.  He stuck to his principles and we can have no argument against that.

I just want to get the message across that none of us publish an image on our blog, exhibit in competitions or give our photographs away as presents unless we are happy with our work and like what we have produced.

In the end, that’s all that matters.

Hoo roo for now