Many thanks to our Judge Nick Hilton, who had the unenviable task of providing constructive feedback for our novice entrants, to our executive members who turned out to help and to the audience members, who took time out of their weekend to support their clubs and the L&CPU.
As you are aware, this event is designed to promote competitions and distinctions to club members who may not normally get involved in the federation annual club competitions.
All those submitting entries were requested to observe the spirit of the competition, otherwise the event fails to achieve its objective and may well discourage genuine novices from entering future events.
This year a decision was made to change the format of the competition, previously an a4 print format. For 2023 we decided to change the format to PDI entries into the Open section. We also changed from 3 judges reviewing the prints to one judge providing instant feedback on the images.
Why did we make the change? There were a couple of reasons – the number of entries had reduced year on year; in 2022 we had 105 entries in mono and 105 entries in colour, if the numbers had dropped any lower we would have to review the feasibility of running the competition – remembering that the prints were judged by three judges and feedback was not given to entrants. We also wanted to actually provide feedback to the club members who may not have had the opportunity to enter images at this level previously and changing to a knockout format with 1 judge allowed this to take place.
So – did the change work? You tell me……….
We had a total of 192 images entered from 24 clubs, there were representatives from 13 of those clubs in the room – did we attract the novice workers to spend the day with us and listen to the feedback given? I will leave that for the people who did attend to judge………..
The number of people ‘in the room’ was less than in previous years; are clubs just happy to receive the results rather than come along and meet other club members and listen to the feedback first hand?
Is there a preference for PDI or Print competitions?
These competitions are not cheap to run and it can also be quite dispiriting to judge quite a high level competition when there are not so many audience members
The Results
Congratulations to Stalybridge PC, it was a very close competition; the winning club image was ‘Bottlenose Dolphin’, Stuart Willis:
Judges choice for Individual image was ‘The Moors on Fire’, Adrian Schofield
Images can be found on the Portal, under ‘Competitions’, ‘View Competition Galleries & Catalogues’ and then selecting the appropriate competition to view.
Wendy Monaghan & Keith Richardson
L&CPU Competition Secretary