Images which the Author might like but which when used in Club Competition..........!

[SJB1956]

This Thread is not to be taken too seriously and for those who do submit images internal club competition it might strike a chord and generate some funny tails and or useful tips for those of us who are less experienced in these matters!
I wonder what others experiences have been? The enclosed ..." Rider in the Sky" ....This one is years old. Taken with what I consider to be the best made of the Olympus Camera's I have owned ....the E3 with a 50-200mm lens. ( Don't own an EM1X but I think thats very similar in feel )
Its was my first outing with the lens and I was on the beach at Godrevy in what was to all intents and purposes a storm. I could barely stand up and the sand was blowing hard and the sea mist, rain and salt spay produced the look of a fog. This Kite Surfer was a lone presence in the bay and he was moving like the clappers. ( or so it seemed to myself )! Over the years I have tried to develop this one a number of times, but it's never really looked right. Originally, I used Apple Aperture and then Worspace but the results were always questionable.
I had another go some weeks ago when I was looking for some images to put into our club competition and trying to find something a bit different !
I now use Capture One Pro and I was really pleasantly surprised. Yes the chap is small in the frame, but I think the colours are good. The judge .....thought the photograph and the action it captured....." had been compromised by the weather conditions" which " produced a uniformly grey backdrop"
I wasn't expecting it to do particularly well, but I wasn't expecting that ! Perhaps a more landscape crop would have helped, but that would have required skills I did't have at the time to extend the canvas.
Thankfully, we take these images for our own pleasure and as long as we like it thats all that really matters. Setting aside valuable and constructive criticism about technical issues and technique etc, ( always appreciated ) if these are ok and we can get a judge to like the image too, I guess thats welcome bonus.

[wornish]

I like it.
I have said before on here that I don't do photo clubs. In my very limited experience the ones around where I live tend to be closed shops with members more concerned about the the cost of the kit used than the image. The judges also become fixated on certain aspects and are very blinkered. No offence to any members who are actually judges😀


Would you like to see what others can do with your image? Or simply comment on this version?

[wanderer]

Judges are interesting. I know there are some amongst the members.

Last year in my club, an image won an evening competition. It was of an eagle, wings outspread, coming straight at the viewer against a backdrop of mountains and sun hesitantly shining through a partially cloudy sky.
It was an image assembled from a picture of an eagle taken at a falconry event, the mountains were in the Alps. The point for me was that the eagle had been flying towards the sun, the mountains were lit from the right and the sun was casting crepuscular rays from the back left.
I don't think I'm on a planet with (at least) 2 suns.
I blurted out that I thought that it was so obviously concocted that it didn't deserve first place and someone else agreed. The judge offered no comment.

[SJB1956]

In reply to Wormish - call me Dave,
If you want to have a play and produce something from this jpeg by all means do. Just make it clear thats its your edit of someone else's image.

The main thrust of the post however was to generate a good humoured and hopefully insight-full chat about how images are judged and perhaps to see if trend differed across the county. In our own area, we have just started to invite judges from outside our two local regional associations to see if there is any difference in approach.

On a more serious note, we have had a considerable number of people leave the club ( and in some cases the hobby ) citing that the main reason for doing so is the way in which images are judged and the feeling that unless they produce a particular type of image, the chances of it doing well in a competition is extremely remote. Clearly, we want our club to retain and attract new members not loose them and so by raising the issue via this topic I was interested to see how other were fairing and then reflect on what was said and see if I could use it to try and improve matters for our members, which might be for the club to stop holding internal competitions and or entering inter club competitions etc.

Night Night.

SB.

[wanderer]

I agree. The judging at my club does seem formulaic. The person who won with the eagle photo mentioned above, is himself a judge. He knows the 'system' and has won the club competition several times and usually places every year.
For myself I've never taken it that seriously although I did win one night and have had several good marks on other occasions. I do find it interesting to hear a judge bring up something that I have missed but often the judge seems to miss the point or effort of the picture.
I've always reckoned it is the hardest thing in photography to get another person, who wasn't there when one took the picture, to get a resonance out of a image.

[MJ224]

My last photo club was in 1973 ish. Competitions were always won by the same people, mainly because their photos were technically superb, and the images were pleasing. My contributions were pretty awful if I remember correctly. But in those days, we had to produce prints at A4 size. Thus we needed a good bathroom and a patient wife...

The club was OK, and I learnt a lot from talented members. Clubs are not just about competitions. They are about, or should be, like minded people helping each other to improve. There will always be the elite, who are usually talented, and know it...:-(

Having said that, I have never joined a local club in the last 50 years or so, thus have little idea how they work now....

[sapper]

I do enter competitions in my two clubs. My competitive nature does not help :-) Some judges are good and have helped me improve my technique and story telling. Some judges wind me up. Competing against creative photographers does help, as someone wrote, iron sharpens iron.(or something similar). I am trying to take images that tell a story, that I like, but with one eye on club competitions.

[Walti]

I've only ever competed on here....

I have been robbed a couple of times by people not voting for my wonderful photos, which were clearly the best !

[Phill D]

I don't really do competitions so aren't really qualified to comment but I do like the image. If it was mine I'd just crop it to portrait.

[MikeOxon]

It's one of those photos where there's a large empty gap between the main subject elements. Cropping to portrait might help but then you lose the effect of the wild wind, which needs the width. A stronger image could be obtained by cheating and bringing the sail down in the image to create a closer relationship between surfer and sail - i.e. cut out a chunk of the blank middle section. You would then have to admit that it was a manipulated image. Something like this:

[SJB1956]

Reply to Mike,
Thank you for the suggestion with the edited image. I do agree your version is the stronger image. Only issue I would have ( if I knew how to do this ) is :
1. the lines of the kite are still visible and pointing out towards the original position.
2. The surfer too is positioned to control the kite in the original position and in the revised location for the kite his body does not exhibit a natural pose for the situation.
I wonder ( ignorance on my part ) do the tools allow you to rotate the kite and the lines. At this would do something to address point 1. I speculate that a fix for point 2 is not possible?
Time perhaps to see if I can find any of the other images taken that day and see if any of them lend themselves to your interpretation.

Thank you again.

Steven

[MikeOxon]

I agree and fudged over those issues! I think my approach, if I took it further, would be to erase all the existing lines and put in new ones with the line tool - and hope your viewers aren't wind-surfing experts "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" [Walter Scott]