Bridgend and The Vale battle it out at the University of Warwick.
With just one image in the whole day achieving the top score, marks were hard to come by. Jan Cawley, The Vale’s Chairman, reports on the club’s first experience of the event.
First of all there are two rounds of 8 images from each club.
There are three judges and they can score either 2, 3, 4, or 5. A score of 3 is average – therefore a score of 9 is a reasonably good image. However , to do well you need scores of 11 to 15. Difficult for us as you will see.
The scores are added and the top 8 or 9 (depending on ties) go through to the final competition and the rest go through to the plate competition. (It`s very much like the ACE of Clubs comp that the WPF have.) BUT just to give you an idea of what we were up against my image ‘Wintry Wood’ which got the FIAP Ribbon only scored 9 !!
Round One images and scores as follows;
Millennium Centre, Cardiff…….Ray…..12
A Conference of Pears………….Jan…11
Female wheatear………………Phil R….12
Hair raiser………………………Karen…13 Our highest score WELL DONE KAREN
Martes Martes (Pine martin)…Roger…12
Zing Quartet………………….Mike D 9 This was also another of ouraward winner!s to score 9 !!!
Subway departure…………..Ed……….10
Platform Drama……………….Jan……..11
This gave us a score of 90 which put us in joint 11th out of 32 clubs. Pretty good, but we were fast using up our best images and now comes the crunch! You have to decide which images are doing well. No landscapes got higher than 9 – most were getting 8. Snowy scenes were doingparticularly badly and were scoring 6 or 8. Natural history were always a good banker but some images were spectacular – this is where Bridgend did well as Jenny Hibbert`s Natural history images were great! Some scored 13. We tried to use images that we knew had done well in the past. This didn’t work too well!!!
Our scores in round two were…
Rusty tipped Page………..Mostyn……….10
Mocker Swallowtails……..Margaret……10
Scurry Racing……………..Mostyn …… 11
Utopia………………………..Pam….. ….11
Descening………………….Ed……………11
All Mod Cons kitchen……..Dave Allen…10
Leading pack……………..Ed….9
Wintry Wood……………..Jan……9
This gave us a total final score of 171. This put us in joint 15th out of 32 clubs.
The ones in RED in the first round were our highest scores and therefore we chose these four to go forward to the last round BUT we also had to find four new images to go with them.
Now the problem.. No snowy scenes, no landscapes – what to pick. We had used up our best images and this is where the other clubs (including Bridgend scored well – they keep their best images till later. We didn’t have enough to do that.
So we decided to pick images from some other members to try them as by then we knew that we weren’t going to do well. Also images with people in tended to do better so in the end we picked the following…
Alien Presence………….Terry………9
The end of the line …….Mike B….. 9
On the beach with Dad…Jan……….9
Electric surfer………….Phil R……….6.
and
Millennium Centre Ray 12
Hair raiser Karen 13
Martes martes…………Roger 11
Femail Wheatear……..Phil R…..11 as you will see these last two images dropped a point from the first round. No control over this at all.
Which gave us a score of80 in the last round.
We were 21st out of 23 and Bridgend with one point more were 20th .
What is so depressing for me is that all these clubs enter every year and therefore have a bank of 40 excellent images (obviously NOT including all the unpopular sorts such as landscapes etc) which they can produce every year. We had to trawl through three years work to achieve what we did. It sort of puts things into perspective. We need more work. We need to get out and take more photographs. We also need more of us to get out to these competitions to see what we have to achieve to compete.
What the judges look for is work of excellent quality. All creative work will only score well if it is of the highest technical excellence, and images with people in do score well. Idid notice however that the popularity of cut out images or old people in front of their house has faded and these did not score well. There were quite a few of excellent quality sports images amongst the winners. The overall competition was won as usual by Wigan 10. When the PAGB issue their winning imagesI will ask Robert to put them on the web site.
We thoroughly enjoyed the day and I personally got lots of new ideas from watching – it was a great experience and I can’t wait to go again next year hopefully just to watch and therefore be able to relax.
I just wish that more of you had been there.
Jan’s comments ….. We need more work. We need to get out and take more photographs. We also need more of us to get out to these competitions to see what we have to achieve to compete … unfortunately seem to apply to all WPF clubs.
It is a sobering thought that until we can correct these things then it is nigh on impossible to progress up the ladder.
We know there is good work out there, it is just a case of getting you, the members, to submit it for selection !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!