Our Turn To Be a Judge

On Thursday 18th April we held a session which we called Our Turn To Be A Judge. The idea was that our members were given the opportunity to critique images in the manner of a judge and to then award scores out of 20. This required us to put ourselves in the shoes of a competition judge and to understand how difficult it is for them to come up with insights (preferably in an entertaining and constructive  manner) and decisions.  

We showed over 60 images which had been submitted to an inter-club competition in the East Midlands in 2019. We also had a record of the scores out of 20 which had been awarded by the actual competition judge, a professional and well qualified photographer, for each of the images.

Individual members reviewed and commented upon individual images which were on general display to us all. Views were expressed about cropping, saturation, composition, exposure levels, focus etc. It was very interesting to find that the points awarded by our individual members were often quite different to those awarded by the judge back in 2019 and that the marks we gave were normally lower than those of the judge!

The view at the end of the evening was that it had been an enjoyable and interesting session. Maybe - just maybe - we won't be quite as critical of the images of our competition judges in the future!

Ray Barnes
CCC Programme secretary

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