Macclesfield Camera Club - Latest News

We held our first internal club competition last Monday (24th October) which was an Open DPI competition. We had a total of 40 entries from 14 members so thank you all those who entered.

This competition was a “club judged” one, where the members get an opportunity (if they wish – which was entirely optional!) to review the images, score them and provide constructive feedback.

We undertook a similar exercise last year and members really enjoyed the experience, so we repeated the process.

The format was broadly similar to last year where we issued scoring sheets on the night so members could record your scores and we totalled the result at the end of the evening to find out which were the most popular images.

Congratulations to the following photographers for the contested first and second place slots, scoring 19 & 20 points

• Steve Gresty
• Kevin Blake
• Jeff Dakin
• Alex White

Congratulations to Steve for his winning image Black Bear Up a Creek.

The full set of the top scoring images can be found on the competitions page: Internal Competitions 2022 – 2023. The details of all the scores and images can be found in the following PDF document: October 2022 – Open DPI Results

Our first external competition of the season was held on 13th October and hosted by Crewe Camera Club. As holders of the trophy we were hoping to emulate last season’s success but in a magnanimous gesture we decided to give one of the other clubs a chance in fact we gave three other clubs a chance. This season’s competition was hosted by Crewe Camera Club via Zoom. Sixty images were reviewed in total, with twelve images from each of the five participating clubs – Crewe, Leek, Macclesfield, Blythe Bridge and Holmes Chapel and judged by John Smith.

As always, the judge’s decision is final and as usual there will always be some debate about the scoring of some of the images.

• John held back 15 images for the top scores of 18-20 points
• Of these 15 images, 10 were wildlife and 5 represented all other genres such as portrait, landscape, sport etc.
• In general images that were not wildlife did not appear to score as well with this judge, although high quality, technically well executed wildlife images do generally score well in these types of competitions.
• There were many judge’s comments about tighter cropping of the main subject, which can be very subjective given the other considerations of surrounding space to balance the overall composition

The results for the evening were:

• 1^st           Leek Photography Club [207]
• 2^nd          Crewe Photographic Society [199]
• 3^rd          Holmes Chapel PS [192]
• 4^th          Macclesfield CC [184]
• 5^th          Blyth Bridge CC [183]

Our images can be found below and their scores can be found in the attached document: Robert Shaw 2022 Results (PDF)

Thank you to John Smith for the judging the competition, to Crewe for hosting this season’s competition and to Steve Gresty for pulling our entry together. Next year maybe we wont be quite so generous.

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Roy has managed to feature in the Macclesfield Express with an half page spread. It’s great to see our members getting recognition for their images. Great image Roy, keep up the good work and posting and hopefully we’ll see more images posted soon.

Competition 3 Results

Monday saw the third and final internal competition of the year. Once again this was an Open Digital competition and we had a total of 33 entries from 11 entrants. That’s a great effort, so thanks to all those who contributed images.

Thanks also go to Andrew Mills who judged the competition.

Andrew is a career long, professional photographer with experience in Commercial, Advertising, Editorial, Documentary, Street and Travel Photography and teaches photography to the higher level.

Andrew’s feedback was both useful and thought provoking and was well received by club members.

You can find out more about Andrew over here at https://www.photomills.co.uk/ .

The competition had a total of five top scoring images, namely:

• Deansgate by Martin Pickles
• Cloudbreak over Tittesworth Water by Alex White
• Orion and Running Man Nebulae by Ian Morison
• Stag in the rain by Jeff Dakin
• Winter wonderland by Vicky Orchard

and Andrew’s preferred overall winner was Deansgate by Martin Pickles.

Congratulations go to all the top-scorers and especially Martin for Deansgate which can be seen below.

You can see the competition results here here and the all of the high scoring images here

2021/2022 Season Results

So after three competitions this year, the internal competition results are now available and I can confirm that the top three places are:

• First place – Steve Gresty with running total of 115 and final total of 98
• Second place – Alex White with running total of 112 and final total 95
• Third place – Jeff Dakin with a running total of 110 and final total 93

So a well deserved many congratulations go to Steve who has topped the charts for a second year running and congratulations to Alex and Jeff as runners up.

Thanks to everyone for their participation this year and we will look forward to lots more great images to follow next season.

The league table can be found here.