3rd Projected Image Competition 10 Mar 09
Tillman Kleinhans, from St Helens CC, was the popular judge on this occasion. President Roger Dye introduced him as a photographer for the past 40 years, a member of his local club for 30 years, and a judge for the past 20 years. And he still found time to be a school teacher. Tillman is enthusiastic about photography and this emerged in his encouraging remarks about most of the images on show. Good images were now the norm and he set a benchmark of 15 for such images.
Slides were shown first. There were 10 altogether which were eventually whittled down to just three images. Though this was nail-biting to most of the audience, our projectionist Phil Riley, remained unconcerned - they were all his images!
In the Beginner/Intermediate section, Tillman commented on the great variety in the 18 images, but eventually homed in on two images - a Pink Cadillac by Katie Garner and Sheep at Kinder Garden by Trevor Rogers. He was finally persuaded by a stern sheep leader to choose the sheep.
There were 81 images in the Advanced digitally projected section. Tillman commented on how good the Club’s Digital projector was in maintaining the colours of the images. He had come across many worse in his judging, sometimes being driven to consider the images on the computer screen for fairness. There were a plethora of excellent images making his job very difficult. His varied comments were that some images needed a point of focus of interest; in some the colours seemed too artificial to ring true; some were a little over-exposed; and with some he found difficulty in what the image was expressing, that they didn’t appear to tell any story. Several images stood out, but he eventually picked a Wild Red Kite as his best in section.
On being asked to choose between the best Slide and the best Digital image Tillman confessed that this was very difficult. The Rock & Tree image was the type he would hope to be able to capture - it was his kind of image. The Red Kite was quite different - He was not sure how he would set about capturing such an image. It was this fact that made him choose the Red Kite as the overall winner.
In his Vote of Thanks Tony Redford stated that he could listen to Tillman’s comments all night; they were both entertaining and educational. He was impressed that after a hard day’s work in the class-room Tillman could still give us such a scintillating performance. And he had finished exactly on 10.00pm. The audience clapped enthusiastically in agreement.