How to enter club competitions, Tuesday 20th September

Hi Folks,

How to enter club competitions, Tuesday 20^th September

The evening was a session to help new members to understand the details around club competitions and how the members photograph images can be entered via the club’s website. Also an awareness of what happens on the competition nights from both the members and the judges point of view.

Dave our internal competition secretary aided with an on screen display talked us through the competition procedures.

The session started with the initial question of “why enter a competition”

It was answered with

• It gives a member a critique of his/her photograph.
• One can also see other club member’s pictures which may give different ideas for themes in the future.
• It will also give members a great sense of achievement as they progress

As each competition takes place, members will see that competition judges have different opinions but by listening to their comments on various photographs it will help in the future competitions.

What club internal competitions are there?

The club’s two internal competitions are

• The Challenge trophy which is run over 5 rounds of different themes set, along with an open category these are entered in digital image format.
• Some of the “Winner on the night” competitions are prints and they will require to be mounted but are also entered as a digital image format

The club now have a new projector and its maximum sizes for showing the digital images are set at 1200 high x 1600 wide. Your image must fit within both those sizes but can be smaller, so if you have a portrait the height cannot be bigger than 1200 high.

The new projector works with a SRGB colour space, so if you work in Photoshop which uses a different colour set you will need to convert it to SRGB to have the same colours as the new projector. We were told the blues and greens between the SRGB and Photoshop Colour Space have the biggest variation.

Print and Digital Images for both “Winner on the night” and the “Challenge Competitions”  now have to have the images loaded on the Clubs Competition Website, as new rules are that the image for prints will be shown on the projector alongside the mounted Photographs but the judge will only be concerned with the prints. These entries must be added by midnight on the Sunday before the competition day. Failure to do so will not allow you to enter, as on the night entry is no longer an option because it involves too much work.

For print competitions the prints can be any size but must fit into a fixed 50cm x 40cm mounted frame. (Not sure what the Kellogg’s Family size box is now lol) but it is always best to have a good mount to please the judges and attract the best marks.  When entering print competitions you must still enter your computer image of your print with your title into the competition section for it to be valid entry.

Before Tuesday Evening also put your name and the title of the print on the back of each mount ensuring any details written are at the top, so your photograph will be displayed the correct way up and will be easier to tie up with the computer entries.

For the digital images on “winner on the night” competitions shown on a projector the sizes of the images to be entered have to have the same sizes upto a maximum of 1200 high x 1600 wide and they have to be loaded on the website by midnight the Sunday before the competition

As mentioned earlier, if print titles and images are not on the website by the deadline they will no longer be accepted as there is too much work involved to do it.

Another new rule

is that photographs used in the clubs internal competitions can no longer be entered in the future clubs internal competitions again…. EVER

Then it was coffee break……………………………………………

The second half

Alan one of our club judges gave us an indication of what a judge may be looking for in a picture. He stated he has liked some photographs sitting in the audience more than others that have been given top marks because they were more of his style but each judge has their own ideas.

The judges are not there to be ruthless in marking and will never give a low marks like four out of twenty and the lowest one could expect to get is a ten. The idea is to give encouragement to the would be photographer and not to disenchant them but to give constructive advice on ways of improving a photograph.

Our Judge Alan has done several humorous blogs on the website which give a sort of background from the judge’s point of view and are worth reading.

We were show five photographs taken at random from last week’s presentations and Alan kindly gave us his views on each one and how he thought they could perhaps be improved. The idea of using the rule of thirds was mentioned as opposed to the subject just being placed in the centre of a picture.

Finally Brian gave members a brief demonstration in Photoshop & Light room on how to size and improve a photograph for the competitions and he went on to show us how to change the image into the SRGB colour space for the new projector.

I think I will just miss out on taking blue and green photographs till I get the hang of it. Oh my new flower pictures are green and blue, now where did I put my orange sunset’s lol

Don’t forget membership fees are now due and you need to have paid to enter competitions

Next week is the

Visiting Speaker: Paul Wilkinson