amipal photography

The week just gone was competition night at the club. "Man-Made" was the subject which, as you can imagine, can be pretty much anything as long as it isn't natural. This of course meant a lot of head-scratching, as the possible entries were so wide. Today I thought I'd share not only the photos I entered into the competition, but also the issues that I deal with when printing them, as well as the selection process itself. Let's start with selection. I make use of Lightroom's Collections so that I can easily group images without removing them from their original locations. This is simply as case of creating a new collection (in this case called "Man-Made - PRINT1"), and then going through my archives looking for things that may be suitable. Simply selecting the image and hitting the B key adds it to the collection - and then move onto the next image. In the end, I have a "virtual folder" of candidate photos for the competition, some of wh...

Thursday just gone was competition night at the club, the set subject print competition for " liquid ". The judge, Ken Wood LRPS, was introduced, and a comment was made that his Flickr page showed a lot of close-up and black and white shots. Which instantly had me thinking I was in with a chance for some good scores for my submitted prints. Camera club judges are always a difficult bunch to please. Some will be very strict on what they want to see in a subject competition, and in this case Ken was very specific - he wanted to see motion, he wanted to get a fluidic feel from the image, and it had to be the main subject of the composition. If a photograph didn't have any of the above, then it received a poor score. The club's scores are out of 20, though images rarely get less than 15. I think the lowest score I've seen is a 12 (which tells me that the range should be reduced to something like 10), but an average score is 17, with anything above classed as very ...