Competition Night

Just had another competition night at the Canberra Photographic Society. Unfortunately I got done for speeding on the way home... which certainly puts a dampener on the mood.

Anyway, here's the images I submitted and some of the judges comments that I remember.


I presented this image as quite a large print at 24" wide. The judge commented that she didn't know if it was a photograph of the bush, or of the hut (she didn't call it a hut, but I can't remember the word she used). She liked the colour and the afternoon light falling on the grass, but was distracted by the sign and the tree to the left of the hut. She also felt that it was tilted a bit to the left - I've never noticed this but I just checked in Lightroom with the straighten tool and she's right. Scored 3 out of 5.


She commented that it seemed to be lit with studio lights (right), shot outside (right) and a picture of the bike (wrong... it's a portrait of the rider and his passenger...geez). She was distracted by the leaf (I think the leaf looks cool...) and felt there was not enough space to the left of the handlebar (agree, and the way the mat board was cut, it was extremely close to the edge). She didn't comment on the expressions on the people's faces which I found a bit strange, especially considering how much time she spent talking about expressions with other photos. Score 3.


She liked this photo, mainly because she couldn't work out what it was I think. She thought the mangrove roots were twigs, but liked the water. Score 4.


She had a lot of good things to say about this photo - colour, child, birds, sea (it's actually a lake, but does look like the sea). She described her emotions when she looked at the photo and had nothing negative to say about it. I'm dissapointed that she had no negative comments considering it's low score. Score 3.

I found her judging to be excellent when criticising the technical qualities of the photo (composition, colour, DOF, sharpness, etc), but her scoring seemed a bit inconsistent and biased towards very abstract photos. The vast majority scored 3, and only one photo scored 5. For some photos she had a lot of negative things to say, but then scored it 3 or sometimes even 4... Some examples - a picture of the lake with the carillion in the background scored 3, but it was a very poor photography IMO, and she had very negative things to say about it...eg. poor composition, bad lighting, etc, etc, so why score it 3? Also, a pretty boring picture of a moose scored 4. The composition was boring, and it had a very distracting piece of grass in the way of the moose's face.

Anyway, it's great to get other people's opinions and especially good to get some good technical critique.