This is all about competitions ?
Did you know ……….
There are four main competitions which are run by the L&CPU Competition Secretary, on behalf of the L&CPU and member clubs within a year.
| The Club Knockout | PDI only | usually held in November. |
| The Bob Robinson Trophy (formerly Novice Cup) | A4 unmounted print | usually held in October |
| Annual Club Competition | print & PDI | usually held early March |
| Annual Individuals Competition | print & PDI | usually held early May |
Each of these competitions has its own plan outlining what needs to be done to deliver the competition. This includes such things as booking venue and hotels for the judges, arranging the refreshments for the day, contacting and booking the judges, collecting and engraving the trophies and medals, sending out communications to the Website and Focal Points and especially clubs so they can put together their entry of prints and PDI’s in good time for the competition.
Then there is the setting up of the competition on the portal, follow up communications, ensuring judges have the rules ….. and the list goes on and on …
Then, so there are no last-minute panics, ensuring that the hardware is in place – laptop, projector, print easel, barcode scanner…….
For each competition we try to allow around 6 weeks from initial notification to closing date for entries. This is a timeline which has been used for a number of years and seems to be working successfully; however people will tend to work to the deadline and the bulk of entries are generally made in the few days leading up to the closing date.
In response to a query I had received, I started to put together a compilation of the competitions the L&CPU had run over the last couple of years; the table is at the end of this piece and, as you can see, with lots of effort the L&CPU executive did run all competitions, although a few were PDI only due to the restrictions at that time.
Looking forward to 2022
We are still working with a degree of uncertainty.
After the Knockout in November, I had started planning the Annual Club Competition and then brought this plan to the Executive meeting on Sunday 9 January for approval.
The communications were planned and ready to go, we had one judge left to confirm – when during the meeting the question was asked, with the rising cases ‘should we put back the competition 4 weeks to allow the current situation (with regards COVID) to settle down’ It was felt that this might give us the best chance of having a face-to-face competition with all sections (print & PDI) and allow more members to feel confident enough to attend the 2-day event. The response was ‘yes’….. and so it was back to the telephones and the administration process is still ongoing – checking venue and judge availability being the main factors. Once all these things have been finalised, the communications can go out to clubs.
I hope you have found this informative and useful, if you have any queries, please let me know. You can contact me on competitions@lcpu.org.uk – Wendy Monaghan.
| Total number of images | Clubs entered into the comp | |||
| 19 & 20 March 2020 | Annual Club Competition | This was the final face to face competition held before the lock down, which came in just a few days later. Both print and PDI sections were run | Print 504 PDI 856 | 22 37 |
| 4 July 2020 | Annual Individuals Competition | This was held as an online event due to the virus outbreak and all meetings being cancelled. Of necessity we were only able to run the PDI section. To allow this competition to go ahead during lockdown, Adrian Lines wrote a whole new programme to cater for the competition. | 2194 | |
| 11 October 2020 | Novice Cup | This competition was run entirely on line, again due to the restrictions in place at that time. Whilst this is normally an A4 print competition, it was run successfully as a PDI in this instance | 935 | |
| 21 November 2020 | Annual Knockout | This is a PDI only competition and was run entirely on line | 328 | 41 |
| 20 March 2021 | Annual Club Competition – PDI section | The Annual Club Competition was run with both print and PDI sections, to enable this to take place the competition was run over two weekends and took some planning | 958 | 42 |
| 27 March 2021 | Annual Club Competition – Print section | It was not possible to move large numbers of prints around the region, so a decision was made to run this section with A4 unmounted prints. As expected the number of clubs entering was reduced, as was the number of prints entered – this could have been due to a number of reasons, not least that a lot of photographers had not been out with their cameras for some time. | 298 | 15 |
| 8 May 2021 | Annual Individuals Competition& Young Photographer of the Year | This competition was held online and was PDI only; the L&CPU executive did have a discussion as to whether to run the print section for this competition, some of the feedback we had from the Annual Club print section was the difficulty members had in sourcing prints, so a decision was made that we would not run the print section. There were nearly 3000 pdi entries from 52 clubs | 2905 11 | 52 3 |
| 10 October 2021 | The Bob Robinson Trophy (formerly Annual Novice Cup) | This was the L&CPU first face to face competition post pandemic/lock downs. There were 236 prints from 42 clubs. The initial communications to clubs went out early August, which allowed around 6 weeks for clubs to put an entry together. | 236 | 42 |
| 13 November 2021 | Annual Club Knockout | This competition does not have a print section, as I am sure you are aware and was the second face to face competition of 2021 | 336 | 42 |