Detail – 21-Jun-2012

Another competition night. This time we had non-SAPF judge Lindsay Poland from City Cross Camera House judging the Detail competition. Lindsay surveyed our work, and although he’s often happy to share opinions (wander in to the shop and have a chat :lol:) he was a bit less fulsome in his comments on this evening.

That worked to our advantage as he quickly judged the images, with some minor critical comments, and as always reserved the highest marks for the absolute best images (no one got a 10!).

But what we did afterward I think added to the night significantly – I asked him why he awarded the images the marks he did – from the low to the high. For example, Jenny Pedlar’s blue door was a great image and he really liked it, but he down graded it a bit due to some distracting elements in one corner. There was a bird print from James that got a lowish mark – the reason was due to what appeared to Lindsay to be over sharpening. A  high key image of my daughters eye was down graded as he felt it needed some more of her face (not just her eye) – to make it more of a story than a clinical image (fair comment). This sort of Q&A generated some interesting discussion from the floor which went on for another 20 minutes and I feel was more productive for many of us as it was a conversation between us and the judge rather than wisdom from upon high.

So if you are all willing, we might try this with some other judges as the year progresses and tease out far more than the thinking out loud we are used to hearing. In the meantime, check out the top digital images (sorry – haven’t had time to get the top prints from authors)

Chris 😉