All About Competitions

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