Blandford Forum Camera Club

On Tuesday 9^th February we held the home leg of our SAPA battle with Kinson CC.  Those who attended, and regular readers, will recall that because the number of clubs in SAPA is indivisible by three, and is in fact ‘x’ with two left over, the remainder have to meet each other twice rather than two other clubs once!   

Our judge for the evening was Bill Aven from Warminster and it was his first visit to the club since he judged our annual exhibition in 2005. On this occasion however, Bill’s job was to award points to each slide from a randomly presented total of twenty-four - twelve from each club - and then to repeat the process with prints.  Our judge found much to enjoy in viewing all of the images but he was still able to discriminate effectively between them and this was reflected in a good spread of marks from six to ten.  Having recently enjoyed the Barry Senior approach, bordering on the avant-garde, it was something of a contrast to experience Bill’s equally valid but more conventional approach.   

The higher Blandford scores were as follows.  In the slides section, Peter Gafney received a 10 for his ‘Viking’, with Dionne Horsfall and Graham Poynter each receiving 9½ for ‘Flower’ and ‘Glimpse of the sun’ respectively.  Peter did remarkably well again in the print section scoring another 10 for ‘Charlotte’ - a fine conventional portrait.  This time he was supported by Colin Cross with 9½ for his ‘Lioness and cubs’ and Malcolm Bowditch with a similar score for his monochrome ‘At Porlock Post Office’.  The other ten awarded during the evening was to Kinson for an impressive environmental portrait of a cheetah.  

And so it emerged that Blandford won both the print competition (by 78 to 73½) and the slide competition (by 76 to 73½) and - since we also won both sections in the away leg - thus ensured a place in both competitions in the league finals to be held at Parkstone on March 24th.  

Malcolm Bowditch