The projected images Natural History competition follows the same strict rules as the printed competition, congratulations to Richard Squires for taking the top spot, followed by Richard Lawrence and Jan Martin.
1. "Juvenile Black Bird with Blackberry", Richard Squires
2. "Solitary Bee", Richard Lawrence
3. "Fox", Jan Martin
In the club we have 2 natural history competitions, one for printed images and one for DPI.
Natural History is different to the other images in that the there are a lot of rules governing what you can and can't do to an image, if you take an image of an animal in a zoo then you can't clone out any distraction, you are only allowed to use cropping to change the framing.
Congratulation to Helen Moore, James Moore and Richard Squires for taking the honours with these fantastic images!
1. "Chestnut Crested Coronets", Helen Moore
2. "Dragonfly India", James Moore
3. "Great Tit with Spider", Richard Squires
Monday evening saw us taking on Saltash and Ivybridge camera clubs in a fight to the death (ok, perhaps not quite to the death!) in the yearly 3-way club battle!
We have not won this competition for several years and we decided to make extra effort this year and it paid off! The competition is split into 2 parts, projected images and prints.
Projected images were judged first and we came first out of the 3 clubs.
For the printed images, we came second behind Saltash but we still had enough points to take the overall victory!
After four rounds we finally get to see who's won overall and it was a tightly run competition with 3 possible winners all competing in the final round. As was last year, consistency was the key as again the overall winner did not come first in any single round.
Overall first place was Tim Gilbert, second place was Helen Moore and third place was Jan Martin!
Congratulations everyone!
The fourth and final part of our in-house judged competition and this time we're delving into the murky depths of pond life!
For this part the winner was Helen Moore with her fantastic shot of a Kingfisher holding his lunch, second place goes to Jan Martin with her crystal clear image of Dragonflies while third place was Tim Gilbert with a wonderfully lit shot of some baby ducklings.
Helen Moore
Jan Martin
Tim Gilbert
The Harry Wiltshire Competition is a "triptych" competition, this means that while each image must stand on it's own, it must also work together with the other 2 images in the panel to form a cohesive whole.
Congratulations to Bill for first place with "Fading Flowers in the Window", James took second place with "Green Crowned Brilliant" and Tim came third with "Pollyjoke Poppies"
1 - Fading Flowers in the Window - Bill Mamatt
2 - Green Crowned Brilliant - James Moore
3 - Pollyjoke Poppies - Tim Gilbert
On Tuesday we had a real treat for the club, a visit from Hugh Letheren who is shall we say, jsut a little enthusiastic about water-droplet photography!
Not only did he talk us through his own journey and set ups he has used, along with some of the history around this style of photography, he was also brave enough to bring his equipment and perform a live demonstration!
More of Hugh's work can be seen on his website: http://hugh.letheren.org/
Some of the images captured on the evening:
The first evening of the new year and we were off with a cracker... it was fantastic to see so many high-quality prints in the monochrome competition and I did not envy the judges task of attempting to pick a winner!
Congratulations go to Janet Downes who took first place with her beautifully crafted image of some flowers, second place went to Richard Lawrence with his slightly creepy shot of an art installation, and third place goes to Jon Burtoft with his imaginative take on Smeaton's Tower.
1. Janet Downes
2. Richard Lawrence
3. Jon Burtoft
Part 3 of our in-house judged competition, this time the theme is "Architecture", congratulations to Helen Moore for taking first place with her excellent shot of the Brighton West Pier. Second place goes to Tim Gilbert for his shot of Hallgrimskirkja in Reykyavik and third place goes to David Gardener with his shot of Wells Cathedral.
Helen Moore
Tim Gilbert
David Gardener
We were fortunate enough to be joined for the evening by the very talented girls from the Geraldine Lamb School of Dance.
The evening was planned around the use of second-curtain flash, this allowed us to capture some movement along with freezing the action and thus adding some dynamic aspects to the shot.
Of course, with multiple photographers all lining up for a shot we could not use the obvious approach of controlling the flash with the camera as this would only allow one person to shoot at a time. To get around this, we decided to use some good old-fashioned time management, with one person in control of the flash... a shout to ask the girls to start their dance move, at this point the photographers would also start their exposures, and at the agreed point we would fire the flash.
While this is certainly not a perfect solution, we had it timed well enough by the end of the evening so that everyone was getting shots they were happy with!
