On Tuesday 20th February Exhibition judge David Butler discussed member’s entries into the Exhibition. The members present each extracted two of their prints and slides from the total for David to comment upon. The evening was different in that the judge could talk directly to the member involved and comment upon the good and bad aspects of the image. Often the viewpoint was not the ideal. Usually the physical situation meant that the author could do little about this, but David explained that he could only judge the image presented, without considering the author’s problems in obtaining the image. A general theme of David’s seemed to be “Keep it simple”

A lively discussion between judge and members brought the evening alive and most members left satisfied that they had had their money’s worth. It was apparent to the judge that the General category (with 80+ entrants) was the strong one, with some of the images being put in other sections to fill the quota. He queried the choice of the Record, or the Photo-Journalism section for some of the images and felt that a better selection of images would have resulted if members were all able to put all of their images into one “Open” section. The problem of the many trophies for particular sections could be met by the judge making his best image choice for the old sections, as a separate task. He felt judges would not be averse to doing this. Several members concurred with this approach admitting that they had better images which remained unused because they had filled their quotas in particular sections.

In his vote of thanks Tony Redford thought we would give serious consideration to these remarks. He thanked David for his work regarding the Annual Exhibition and for his willingness to talk frankly yet positively about the images presented that evening.

Bill Chadband