News

March 2024 First Print Competition 

The 1^st print competition of 2024 was held on Thursday 21^st March at St James church Hall the home of the Nottingham Outlaws. The print competition is run on a bi-monthly basis, through to the final round which is in November of the same year and all rounds contribute to the Outlaw’s print league table. 

The judge for this first round of the competition was Bob Richards who is a member of Nottingham & Notts Photographic Society. There were two categories for Bob to judge, the Open category and the Themed category which in this instance was “Transport”. In total there were 26 entries in the open and 29 in the themed.

The Open competition again attracted a wide variety of genres of photography including sport, nature, portraits (including artistic nude), landscape (including local scenes), sunsets, and several of these images were presented in black & white. The themed competition equally had interesting array of modes of transports and Bob said that there were many images worth holding back for a second look.

February see’s the start of the Outlaws league competition year and the first competition is a projected digital image (PDI), over the course of the year there will be a further four PDI’s, these are interwoven with a separate print competition on a bi-monthly basis.

This month’s competition had sixteen entrants (many new entrants) all wanting to take the tittle of Outlaw of the Year off the current holder Lester Woodward.

The judge for the evening was Stephan from Newark Camera Club. 

There were two categories for Stephan to judge, the Open category and the Themed which for February was “Abstract”. In total there were thirty submission entries in the Abstract section and twenty-eight in the Open.

Here are the key details:

Apart from a brief fling with a Zenith film camera when I was a teenager, and later taking holiday and family photos, I didn’t really get into photography until I bought my first digital camera which allowed me to see what I had taken instantly, instead of waiting a week or more for prints to come back. I then took a City & Guilds course in photography.  After completing the course I wanted to continue to learn more about photography so I joined NOPS, which gave me the support I needed, and with monthly competitions it also gave me a reason to go out and take images I would not normally have thought about, and a reason to practice my post processing skills (and still does).  

In the 80’s I carried out studio work for a marketing company which began my interest. In the 90’s I became Digital Print Manager for a company and even though I was working abroad I was travelling around a lot and did not have time to carry on with my photography. I met my wife in 2006 and her (adult) son was very interested in photography and this sparked my interest again having someone to talk to about equipment etc. I then purchased my first Nikon, a D300 digital camera. Due to health confines I only used my camera infrequently. I then purchased by Sony AR74 in 2022 and following a chance meeting with Nick Pearce at Langar airfield (both of us taking photographs), this spurred me on to join the Outlaws in 2023.