amipal photography

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

For a while now, I've been thinking of images I could submit for the next camera club set subject print competition - "liquid" is the theme, and entries due in tomorrow. Going through my LR catalogue metadata, I found plenty of shots of the sea - well, I do live right next to the English Channel! But this seems like a bit of a cop-out for the theme, and particularly if the sea itself is only part of the subject, as it would be in a landscape. A stroke of luck presented itself one evening after work, when I glanced out of the kitchen and saw a single iris had bloomed in the rockery outside the back door. It had been drizzling most of the day, and a delicate pattern of droplets had formed on the petals. However, I wasn't able to get outside to shoot it until much later in the evening, by which point the sun had long since set. Which meant a tripod, a flash, and my Raynox 150 macro adapter on the end of the Lumix 14-140 Mk2. A variety of compositions, apertures a