Points Cups No. 5
Feb 3rd, 2010 by Keith Chaloner
On Tuesday 2nd February we held the fifth of our 2009-10 Points Cup competitions and it was our pleasure to welcome Barry Senior as our judge for the evening – and, of course it was delight to see Fiona who also came along. Barry gave, as might be expected, a careful, considered and valued commentary on our various offerings. In judging the total of eighty-four images, he focussed on the importance of getting technical aspects right from the start, if only because these are elements that are completely under our control and deficiencies are there for all to see. In particular, it was noted that images could really suffer from being ‘overworked’ in the post-capture processing stage. Barry identified several examples of this from among our images which had resulted from excessive sharpening. However, we at Blandford are not alone in this respect because it so happened that Barry was also the judge at the SAPA All v All DPI competition at Wimborne last week and he made similar observations on images submitted from all around the area. Having commented on technical matters, a judge would then focus on the more subjective aesthetic aspects of the image. It was at this stage that we were reminded, for example, that a larger picture is not necessarily a better one.
In the event, the slide entry of thirteen failed to yield any maximum marks but both David Cornes and Julian Forder were awarded nines. The DPI competition, with thirty-seven entries, resulted in one ten going to Evan Jones and with four others coming close with 9½ each. They were John Burt, Norman Carey, Evan Jones and Marilyn Peddle.
As an aside, it was again interesting to note that although slide entry numbers continue to be quite low, projected images as a class are booming with the numbers of DPI submissions exceeding the numbers of prints entered.
Malcolm Bowditch
