August 2025 Fourth PDI Competition
It is August already and the Outlaws are undertaking their fourth Projected Digital Image (PDI) competition of the year and it’s just not the summer days that are warming up, the PDI competition is too. Preceding this month’s competition, the DPI leader-board was as follows, Lois Webb on 216 points, Malcolm Nabarro 209 points & Sue Jackson on 206 points.
The evenings judge was Roy Maddison from Long Eaton Camera Club, Roy offered constructive comments and scored the images in his own unique style.
There were two categories for Roy to judge on the evening, the Open category and the Themed, which this month was “Metal”. There were approximately thirty-two in the Open category and thirty-four in the themed.
The Open competition attracted many genres of photography from portraiture study, wildlife, sport, and landscape images to name but a few.
The themed competition equally had a wide variety of images with many different visual interpretations of the theme and Roy again offered his opinion, critique & some suggestions of editing that would (in his opinion) benefit the image.
Theme Competition – Metal
The Themed PDI had images ranging from steam trains, traction engines, rusted chains, locks, abandoned cars, metal gates, through to a blacksmith forming a horseshoe on his anvil. A selection of these images is incorporated further on in this article so please take a look and you will see how our photographers’ imaginations really got to work with their own individual interpretations of the theme.
Roy commented that the images on display this evening were of a very high standard and made his job of judging very difficult. He managed to whittle them down to a final few and announced that the winner was Malcolm Nabarro with his image titled “Heavy Metal”.
Winning image “Heavy Metal” by Malcolm Nabarro.
Malcom told me about his image; “This is one of many images I took during a mass Brass Band concert given outside the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. There were hundreds of players so it was difficult to home in on a little cameo, but the three Tuba players worked very well, particularly as they were wearing different coloured jackets. I did some work on the image to crop and get rid of various arms and legs I didn’t want to see. When the competition theme of ‘Metal’ came around this image seemed spot on and having lifted one of these instruments I knew that HEAVY METAL was an apt title”.
Open category
The Open category had many different genres of photography, Motorcycle racers, landscapes, studio style model photography and nature images. Nine images were held back for final judging but two other images were awarded scores of 17 points, all of which are on display in this article.
Open category winning image “Front Crawl Action” by Nigel Stewart.
Nigel told me that his image was taken at a recent Nottingham Outlaws triathlon event at Holme Pierpont water sports centre. “I could see the swimmers preparing to get into the water to start their swimming stage so I acquired a position on one of the nearby floating pontoons this would give me a water level perspective, at a level with the swimmers. I was set ready with my 100-500mm telephoto lens at f6.3 and a fast shutter speed to ensure a sharp image”. I was pleased with the results and the low angle definitely gave the image impact.
Following this round of the DPI competition the overall standings for the top three positions are as follows. 1st place is Lois Webb on 285 points; 2nd place is Malcolm Nabarro on 281 points & 3rd place is Lester Woodward on 276 points.
The Outlaws would like to thank Roy for providing everyone with constructive comments, giving the authors positive suggestions on ways they may enhance their images and also having an appreciation of the Outlaws creative works.