Frodsham PhotoForum

[Mufi]

So another three- way competition and another no win. This from our club that has produced some excellent photography this season.

So where are we going wrong? I think we are doing ourselves no good turns in the way we select images for external competitions. Asking members to bring in prints, slides or digitals for possible selection invariably means that we do not get the best work the club has. Some members may be away, may forget or just not bother to dig out their entries, so the selector/selectors do not have the best to choose from, as was obvious at Wilmslow. And selection by majority vote doesn’t work either, with the strong likelihood of the “peer loyalty” effect and the fact that, understandably, many members have no idea of what will or will not do well in competitions.

Of course it may be that we are just not up to the standard of the other clubs we compete against, but we should attempt to enter our strongest images in any case, and I do not believe that we do this at present.

The solution is obvious and would only require a minor change to the competition rules, to allow the retention of members work for possible external competition use.
This way the outstanding work (though not necessarily just the winners) in the internal competitions would be retained and would be available for any outside competitions. This would not only help to ensure that we select the best, but would also greatly reduce the workload of the competition secretary.

Digital images are even easier; we already have these in stock so there would seem to be no reason to ask members to re submit. Asking them to submit them in 1400x900 size as well would probably be a step too far though asking would do no harm.

[lynda]

Hey Dave - we won the three-way last year and our prints did very well this year. We also did very well against Wilmslow who have a much larger membership entering competitions. So we are up to the standard of other clubs but I do agree that the selection process needs changing and this is something we will look at before next year.
Lynda.

[Phil]

I was one of the people who championed the idea of having the members select and I still think this is important - the members should feel involved with all aspects of the club's activities. However, I agree that, on reflection, there might be a better way of doing this - perhaps by creating a shortlist from comp entries for the members to choose from.

I also must agree with Lynda. We were close to Wilmslow - a club that some suggested would wipe the floor with us. We even had two of the top three scoring images. In the 3-way, we were only a couple of points behind Mid Cheshire after the prints - it was just the projected images that let us down a little and I do honestly think we had some harsh scores for some of those (although I thought the judge was very good generally). So, we shouldn't be too despondant.