2nd Projected Image Competition 9 December 2008
Judge Dave Bibby AFIAP, BPE3* from Hassra Fylde Photographic Society told us that he had learned a lot about judging from the late Graham Schofield. Dave declared at the outset that he was an outdoors man who had this summer completed his task of climbing all of the Munroes. This was his subtle hint that he was passionate about landscape images, particularly of mountains he knew and had climbed. He was eager to see how our digitally projected images turned out as he had not been impressed with his own club’s projector performance. However he was immediately impressed by the standard of the images he saw, including the Beginner Worker images. He felt they mostly deserved a good mark (out of 20) which meant later on in the proceedings he felt obliged to give half marks in an attempt to differentiate between good images.
The judge noticed that a number of the digital images had been given borders. In some cases this assisted the image, though occasionally he felt it detracted. For example in a monochrome image the white border emphasized the lack of tonal range. But borders seemed to assist close-up or detail images. Dave was delighted to see images of mountains with subtle skies, and he liked the simplicity of other images (for example a single back-lit pine). There was no indication that Jonathan Bawden had been in prior contact with the judge when we finally discovered that two of the three 20’s in the advanced digital section (the frozen mountain and the Pine) belonged to Jonathan. When asked to compare the best digital, with the best film slide (Frank Hutchinson’s Stamens) the judge chose the Mountain.
John Ade proposed the Vote of Thanks. He congratulated Dave on his Munroe achievement; and noted that he had faced a similar difficult task in choosing between the many varied images tonight. He had been intrigued to discover that this was the first Digitally projected image competition he had judged; but clearly the judge had enjoyed the challenge. Once the applause had died down President Roger Dye thanked Joyce Robson and Stephanie Clack for providing the tea and coffee.