Competition 1 Photo Review

HC - B Grade: Open Digital - Dambos Giant Santi Ikto © Tracey Noonan

The photo reviews are back for 2024

Something we started during COVID times when the judge had left us after a judging, photo reviews are us jumping through the competition entries as a club and discussing the images and the judges comments about them.

Now we'll be doing these the week after judging, aiming for about an hour. In the review of our first competition for 2024 we took a look at the judges comments and even had a bit of a play with some of his suggestions. 

Some of us agreed with some of the judge's suggestions for images while for other image suggestions we wholeheartedly disagreed. 

We talked about some of the things you can do in Lightroom when making a monochrome image, the main one being holding down your Alt (Option on Mac) while you drag your white and black sliders in the basic section you can see when the shadows and highlights begin to clip and then know you have a white and a black and everything in between making it more likely to have a good tonal range. 

We also noticed a couple of the images submitted didn't strictly fit the monochrome theme as they had some colours bleeding through, so just watch out for that, while our judge missed it on this occasion another judge will see it as a basis for disqualification. 

Some learned to express their appreciation of an image that they didn't quite get when they saw it on judging night, and we also learned that our images have to tell their own story, we can't rely on the judge to have knowledge of our subject when viewing our images. 

We'll likely do these again for the foreseeable future, typically the Tuesday after judging. Though we'll be sure to power through them a little faster than we did last night. We ended up spending about two and a half hours discussing our images, not that I regret it, there was some valuable discussion going on. 

These are NOT being recorded so I encourage interested members to join us in the future, an email will be sent out prior to the Zoom call, so keep an eye on your inbox. Basically I think the banter is good in the moment, but nobody wants to wade through 2.5 hours of banter to pick out a nugget or two.