Informal critique evening #1

Informal Critique Evening – 17th September

Ever wondered if your image was good enough to enter in a competition? Or you felt it needed editing in some way, but had no idea where to start. Then this week’s meeting was the ideal place to get advice.

We are lucky in the club to have 3 qualified judges. Tonight, one of them, Alan Taberer had the task of advising on the full entry of 36 images. A diverse selection of pictures were entered. We had wildlife, portraits, abstract, architectural and panning to name a few.

Alan was one of the founder members of ImageZ camera club back in 2002, and has been judging since 2014. We are lucky to have his expertise on hand. He gave a lot of fair and helpful advice on each image. Giving us all good food for thought.

He started the evening explaining how competitions work and how, as a judge, personal likes and dislikes must be put aside. There is a formula to assessing an image. He stressed the fact competition images are a genre of their own, not necessarily the image that all your family and friends love, or holds memories for you, or took you hours to get! Some good pointers to remember were:

• Does it have immediate impact? The Wow factor.
• Why was it taken, and what message are you trying to convey?
• Avoiding something that’s happened locally recently, there may be others taken at the same even, therefore loosing the impact.
• The technical criteria, and having strong shapes on images make them more striking.
• Improve an image by creative composition, taking from a different perspective.
• The usual, ‘look for bright spots’, especially round the edges. These draw your eye away from the main subject.
• Try and get separation within the subjects.
• Think about lighting.
• Think about the title. Is it relevant? Does it add to the image? Sometimes it can help the Judge, sometimes confuse!

Alan felt some of the images would be improved simply by just some creative cropping.

Thank you Alan for your entertaining, useful and inspirational advice.

Here’s a selection of the images that members put forward for critique.

Blog post written by Tami Nunley

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Next week

This will be the first practical night of the season. This session will have an autumnal theme with a variety of woodland items to photograph. Please bring your cameras, tripod if you have one, standard or macro lenses along. Also if you want to being some light, maybe a torch, led light or similar and even more autumnal subjects please do.