Blandford Forum Camera Club

The Club held the home leg of its annual friendly battle against Camborne and Redruth on Tuesday 23rd September when the judge was Norman Wiles.  In these competitions, fifteen prints and fifteen slides are entered by each club and the marks are out of ten, as is normal for us.  Although there were a lot of high marks, only three tens were awarded during the course of the evening and all of these came to Blandford.  Dionne Horsfall was given the maximum mark for her very highly regarded print of two carnations and Colin Cross (barn owl in doorway) and Malcolm Bowditch (steam train at station) received tens for their slides.  The writer never expected to see his name in the same sentence as ’slide’ (much as he admires them) - not to mention ‘ten’.  And he doubts he ever will again!  In the end we won the print section by the margin of 134 to 123½ and the slides by the rather narrower margin of 125 to 118½.  This means that our prints received an average mark of 8.93.  Readers will decide for themselves what, if any, significance this has.

This event was the first occasion on which the club has used digital conversions in a slide competition and the results, it would seem, were not great.  As a matter of fact, such conversions are not acceptable for our in-house club competitions although they are becoming increasingly common in inter-club events.