We had a chap call at the door the other day selling fish. He had the gift of the gab. He started asking me what some of the plants were in the porch as he was into house plants himself. I get a head-rush from plants, fascinated by the seamless beauty of the transformations they pass through during their life cycles. He showed me pictures of some beautiful ones on his mobile. His other passion he said was photographing aeroplanes and enthusiastically ran through a load of those. My eyes glazed over. (Anyway, the cod and salmon fillets will be delivered from Grimsby on Thursday.)

Funny how as individuals we get turned on by some subjects, yet others leave us feeling brain dead. However rigorously our judges try to be objective, they will be affected by their personal preferences; they wouldn’t be human otherwise. The easy part of their job is to knock points off their score for technical or compositional ‘faults’, but we could all do that couldn’t we. We know what’s wrong with our pictures. But if, for example, wildlife or landscape pictures don’t do anything for you emotionally, you would always find some reason for not giving them a decent score.

So I felt a bit sorry for Peter Merry judging our Projected Image and Print of the Year Competition on Wednesday. Some fabulous pictures, but how to separate them? Prints first, he started off holding back most of them. Then, getting nervous perhaps, turned up the discrimination level. A nice chap Peter with a sense of humour but I sensed he was struggling to be objective at times.

If you’re in a reflective mood, you might like to think about where you lie on the preference spectrum. Do you go for organic or inorganic? Organic would include flora or fauna, or pictures of people. Inorganic would be architecture, landscapes and abstracts. Do you want certainty in your pictures or like mystery? For example, does what your pictures convey give all the answers or do they leave the viewer to develop their own narrative? Do you like order or chaos?

Do you like creative or conventional? Pictures that challenge the viewer with something they haven’t seen before, or ones that conform to commonly accepted standards such as the English landscape painting tradition. How much of a ‘controller’ are you? Do you like to spend a lot of time on post-production, or do you prefer to let your subject speak for itself through your camera lens?

In the end, Peter awarded a whole load of awards to both prints and PDIs so I will just reproduce them here without trying to remember what he said about them. They all deserve a second viewing – except perhaps my bog roll. Peter said that the more he thought about it, the less he knew what to think about it. Admirable honesty!

Congratulations to everyone for a great set of pictures and for giving Peter such a challenging evening. It was entertaining wasn’t it, and thanks again Peter.

PRINTS

Congratulations to Alfred for his winning Print of the Year.

PROJECTED DIGITAL IMAGES

And congratulations to Martin for his winning PDI of the Year

Author: Diddy Dodds