Andrew Macpherson

The Club Chairman’s evening was a great reminder not to ignore your pre-digital photography.  It was a great show based on old scanned negatives from his trip through South America, the Galapagos and Easter Island — A sort of “in the footsteps of Heyerdahl”  section of his round the world trip.  I though that some of his photographs from Easter Island were much better than those of the same subjects on show at the Kon Tiki  museum in Oslo.

It was also a great reminder of how in many ways it is much easier it is now to capture an image.  Being able to swing the sensor’s ISO between extremes makes photography much easier, but the older technology did not have us keeping careful track of white-balance to the same extent.

It’s also interesting as one works through the family photographic archive scanning old slides, and later negatives  with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 to see how photographic habits have changed.  One’s parents/grandparents were content with 6 exposures as guests at  wedding — how many did you take last time you went to one?  Or perhaps consider a whole holiday on 2 rolls of film. It brings into focus the reasoning behind Adobe’s early decision to leave light box functionality out of  LightRoom.

On Friday evening I went to an eye-opening evening at Hertford Camera Club who had invited Kevin Herbert, a judge of 35 years experience, to give an insight into the judge’s view of a competition.

He added to the theory I had spent days researching about depth of field and the viewing distances which reduce a circle of confusion to a single point in human perception, with a remark about a British standard for how close to inspect a print.

The answer was a fairly surprising requirement to view from a distance of twice the diagonal, and not more than four times the diagonal, which he qualified with the comment that one can then look closer to analyse defects seen from that range.

That was the technical bit.  Most important was the initial overview in which the judge has to assess the author’s intent, or at least the effect of the author’s work and presentation, putting firmly aside personal likes and dislikes of subject matter.  How to deal with the technically excellent presentation of the boring or revolting, the technically poor but original presentation?  All good thought provoking stuff and an evening well spent.  I hope we’ll have Kevin along to the local club in the near future, as I’m sure others would enjoy his talk, and come away with entirely different highlights.

What a revelation! There are speakers out there who will entertain and inform, as most do, and still mix in useful photographic, and club competition knowledge at the same time.  Until David Steel came along the overwhealming message from the club had been (continue reading…)

I admit it, I don’t understand photo competitions and club judges.  There’s an old camera club joke told by longer serving members:

The Heavenly Camera Club agreed to an inter club battle with Satan’s Snappers.  Saint Veronica’s view was “How can we lose? We have all the great photographers!” 

But as Satan retorted  “We can’t lose — we have all the Judges“

Certainly it sometimes feels that way.  But it would be nice to know what they look for — sometimes it’s infuriating to get comments about one’s photoshop technique when the photo is a highly creative ‘as shot’ image, or remarks about distant sea when the image was shot in the mountains at an altitude od 2000 metres looking down into an enclosed valley.  So all right the photograph has to communicate unaided, but for the same photograph to get a 6/10 one week, after a 10/10 “possibly some commercial value” the previous week. Pfui.

While I’m having a moan let’s add antique, and possibly inadequately calibrated display technology to the set of sitting ducks to take pot shots at.  HDTV 1080i is here (1960×1080), projectors are available from  £999, yet clubs are only just moving to 1460 bits as the standard resolution for competition, Bizarre or what?

Anyway after my first year of club competitions I’m moving toward a few general guidelines which of course can be ignored for particular effect.  I really would like feedback and correction here, so please don’t hold back with your comments.  In no particular order

• Eyes must always be in pin sharp focus
• Use high gloss paper.
• Photos with motion blur must have 1 sharp line across the direction of blur
• Keep portrait format for prints, and photos that need the sharpening that you get from the massive shrinkage.  Digital projection is low resolution and not subtle.
• Expect your near whites to be burned out, and near blacks to be black when projected, and to be criticised for these failings of the equipment / environment.
• Never use more than a hairline to frame a projected image
• Remember that the bevel in a standard mount frame gives you an edge for your print, and that mount board is available in black core, so you can delimit the edge of a light coloured print
• When mounting prints, offset the cutout window slightly toward the top of the frame
• Think very carefully before using coloured mount board, some judges can take that into account, also make sure the edges of the mount are not visibly damaged.
• The judge is usually within 6 feet of a print.  It doesn’t have to look any good from the middle, let alone the back of the hall.

I feel better for that, but what have I missed, where have I grabbed the wrong end of the stick?  Over to you.