Last nights judge travelled from Wales to judge our entries and he was quite elderly although he seemed very sprightly, but he obviously had lots of experience and said he had his first camera in 1947. He was certainly different in his approach and unlike many other judges I have seen he went through all the entries several times and commented on every one regarding camera technique and his overall impression of the image being judged and pointing out things he liked or disliked and what he may have preferred to see. He then went through them all again and gave each image points out of 20 and as an indication of how the overall scoring went, his lowest mark was 13 and his highest mark was 20.
It was obvious from the beginning that this guy took no prisoners and much to the surprise of many senior members he gave very low marks for their entries. He also gave low marks for poor images so it was difficult at times to see where his preference’s lay and to be honest I was not holding out much hope on my own.
Anyway in the Mono section he gave my Woodland log image a slightly below average mark of 14 and said he liked it overall, but thought it was over sharpened which was a fair comment.
Things picked up with my Smokey Spoon image and he said he liked the technique and its simplicity and held it over as a potential card winner. It did go through to a final judging and was awarded 17 points and a Commended certificate, so I was quite pleased about that.
In the Colour section, my Egypt composite image was also given 17 points and he made a comment that he could not be sure if it was a photograph of another picture in a frame that had been used to create it, or if it was one of the photographers own images and if it was then he would have rated it higher.
You cannot comment during the judging so I could not tell him that it was actually another of my images used inside the picture frame and not a framed painting although I did tell him so later in the evening. Having said that I was happy enough to get in the top points and although there were a couple of others with the same higher score, mine did not go through so no card for that one. 
The big surprise was that as well as the 17 points awarded for my Egypt image he also held back my Butterfly image into the final selection and made some nice comments about clarity, colour and general composition. When it came down to the places I was thinking to myself that a Highly Commended would be nice, so when he gave the Commended to another image my hopes were raised, I would at least now get the Highly Commended which would be a feather in my cap. When he gave the Highly Commended to someone else I began thinking Wow! I may even get a Third place certificate.
His laser pointer hovered over the final three images which comprised mine and two of the top guys in the club with images that always did well in competitions. "I will give this one Third place" he announced and it wasn’t mine! Double wow! I could be getting a Second place card here. He continued to scrutinise the last two images and his pointer hovered over my entry, excellent I though, a second place card, I was well chuffed.
With his pointer on MY image he said “ I am awarding this image 1st place and the other one is Second”
To say I was surprised is an understatement, but of course very pleased to have gained that card. I could see a few people looking about to see who this person was who had beaten them all, but I could also see a lot of people applauding and obviously pleased that I had won and many commented later that they thought that the judging was really good and it made a change to see someone else winning and not the usual candidates.
So there you have it, a good night all round for me and that means I will have one of my images scrolling around on the clubs web-site.
My winning image
