Melbourne inter club challenge Thursday November 17th.

Once again we pitted our whits against the photographic club of Melbourne (Derbyshire not Australia), and as anticipated it was a close affair.  

The Judge for the competition was David Grounds.

The competition was for both digital and prints, with each club having 15 of each.

First up was the digital, it looked like the game was up from the start, with our opening 3 images scoring 10, 15 and 12.  David was quite critical of Lester’s “crying on the inside” for not having a white line around it to delineate it from the background (need to note this for subsequent comps), it got mentioned on almost every following image that did have a border added.  We started to claw a bit back with “frog leg leaf beetle”, “just sitting” and “kings cross rush hour” all being held back.  “Red Mistress” caused much commotion from the judge describing it at saucy and mysterious, but it got held back along with “Swallows feeding” and “Temples at Dusk” which he described as a wonderful leading journey through the image.  So looking a bit better we had 6 held images to 5 for MPS.  A second view of the held images resulted in just 3 images being held back, “Kings Cross Rush Hour”, “Red Mistress” and “Swallows Feeding” all from NOPS.  The close victor was “Swallows Feeding” which ha described as fabulous.  

So the scores at the end of the PDI gave NOPS 234 and MPS 230.

Quickly onto the prints, a bit tricky for the judge as he didn’t look through them prior to judging. The judge seemed to really like simple or black and white images. We scored quite well with “Doorstep salesman” and “Costa Coffee” (which he described as a lovely little slice of nothing), but he didn’t hold them back.  We did eventually edge the held image score by 6 to 4.  Our held images were “Before the Dawn”, “Tubeways”, “Fake”, “I’m Outta Here”, “Well Worn Face” and “On The Ropes”.  From his comments it looked like “On The Ropes” would just pip “Well Worn Face” to the top score, but as it turned out “Before the Dawn” was our top scorer with 19 and the top score going to the BW image of “New Brighton Lighthouse” by MPS.

The scores for the prints gave NOPS 236 and MPS 228.

Overall victory to NOPS, edging both the DPI and the Print.

Many thanks to all that supplied images it was a very good cross section of images in both content and authors. Congrats to Steve Roper for winning the DPI and a special note to Phil and Tabby who’s first time print images scored very well for us.  See spreadsheets for full score list.

-Lester Woodward,

External competition secretary.