a much better camera club

Tonight's Camera Club was a vast improvement on last month's total travesty... mostly due to the fact that the judge was an actual human being with a sense of humour and a clue.

We've had him before, he's one of what I call the "story judges"... actually, I think he might be the only one... but when he judges he always says that for him it's more important that the image communicates something to him, some kind of story, than it is that the image is technically flawless. Which I actually like in a judge, because some of my images aren't always perfect on a technical level, but I like to think there's some kind of story or depth to them.

Having said that, he did score everyone a little harshly in spots, saying that he really liked an image and that it was brilliant, and then scoring it lower than you would have expected. In my case it seemed to be a case of monochrome versus colour images... my mono shots got judged first (as always) and I got mediocre scores for them, but I got better scores for the colour images when they came up.

The colour images, Looking Out (bottom right) and Under the Jetty (top right) scored 8's... and the mono shots, Rememberance (top left) and Stretched Out (bottom left) scored 7's... so not bad overall really.

Three of those images (everything except Looking Out) were actually the last of my "new" images... I'd had a vast number of images printed up to use in the monthly contests in January 2005, and then added to them again around the middle of that year (over 40 images in all), and the three from tonight are the last of them... and honestly, I have nothing to replace them with. I haven't done any shoots since July last year... not real shoots, people shoots, portrait shoots... or just shoots with my SLR for that matter... so I don't even have anything new to have printed.

I think that I'm going to make the Trophy for Portraiture competition at the end of October my last club meeting actually... although I have a couple of shots left in the "could be resubmitted" folder that would last me to the end of the year, I think that is probably as good a time as any to call it a day... especially since they start harping on about membership renewal around the time of the year (plus, it's the end of the club calendar year more or less)... I'll go to the AGM at the beginning of October, then the Portrait comp... then that's it...

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