This week’s evening was one full of firsts: our first print competition of the season, our first monochrome evening of the season, and (most interestingly) our first ever hybrid evening, during which we got to enjoy both print and projected images on the same night!
The format of the evening worked really well in my humble opinion: we enjoyed the mono prints in the first half of the evening, before moving on to the projected images after the break. Not only did this format mean we got to enjoy a wider portfolio of work, but it also meant that those of us that enjoy printing had an opportunity to choose which medium (print, digital or both) we wanted to enter our work in. A great success and something we should certainly repeat in the future 😊
So our judge for the evening was Simon Bedwell LRPS who joined us from Tandridge (if like me you don’t know where that is, Wikipedia describes it as “a village and civil parish in the Tandridge District, in the county of Surrey, England. Its nucleus is on a rise of the Greensand Ridge between Oxted and Godstone” so there you go)!
Kicking off with the mono prints, we had six entries in the standard class and seventeen entries in the advanced class, which was really great to see.
After the usual run-through of the images, Simon held back five of the six standard class images, rightly noting that all of them were worthy of a special mention. In reverse scoring order, these were:
Congratulations to Martin D for his win! Simon was particularly impressed by the well-controlled exposure and moody clouds.
In the advanced class, Simon held back eight images. In reverse scoring order, these were:
Well done to Mandy for her win! Another stunning wildlife image that expertly captures the action of a squirrel in flight!
After the break and a quick change of room setup, we moved on to the projected images, where we were treated to fifteen images in the standard class and twenty four images in the advanced class.
In the standard class, seven images were held back. In reverse scoring order, these were:
Well done to Anita G for this very well seen and captured image (a personal favourite of the night for me!).
In the advanced class, Simon held back eight images. In reverse scoring order, these were:
Well done to Chris R for this excellent long-exposure capture of a famous London landmark.
Throughout his judging of both the prints and digital images, Simon shared a number of helpful thoughts and observations with us that members might wish to keep in mind when preparing entries for future mono (and in some cases, colour) competitions:
- Consider giving images enough space around the edges e.g. don’t crop too close to the top of a tree
- On the flip side, consider cropping / cloning out unnecessary detail .. with mono, sometimes less is more and cropping can help to isolate subjects and remove distractions
- Make sure that your horizons are level, and if you have verticals in your image try to adjust them in post-processing so they don’t converge
- Simon’s preference seemed to be for an image to have a focal point. He also enjoyed images that had a good depth of field, good tonal range, and evoked a feeling of “being there”
- Simon also suggested that for images where there is a high level of contrast between bright and dark areas (for example, the inside of a building looking out through a window), consider taking two or three image at different exposures and then blend them together in post-processing to create an HDR (high dynamic range) image
- For those entering digital images, remember to add a keyline, especially for images with dark edges
It was a real pleasure to see so many images entered in both the print and projected image categories, and to have those images be of such great quality and variety of subject! Well done to everyone that entered, and I leave you with a question that Simon repeatedly suggested we consider: “Is mono appropriate for this image?”. That is indeed a very good question, and one that I still struggle to consistently get the right answer to!
0 Comments