The new competition season has started and the first round was a digital image round. This year at the camera club it is a transition year and there are no separate divisions – everyone’s images are being judged in one competition.
Baltic beach fun
This image was a candid shot I took at the beach outside Skagen where the North Sea and the Baltic meet.
Judge’s comments
[… discourse about where the lady’s husband is, how much alcohol she has had the night before ….]
… an interesting family shot, one you’d store in your memories
… we have a little boat
… sadly it is such an overcast day that we haven’t anything light or bright in the sky to really make the picture zing
… good family shot, good record shot of the holiday
The scores
There were 59 images in the digital round.
‘Baltic beach fun’ scored 5.5. and was last equal with 5 other images.
The original image
I chose to enter this shot as it was one of the few times recently that I’ve been comfortable taking images of children in public.
The light was very bright and I was using exposure compensation to compensate.
I removed the large ships and slightly blurred the remaining yacht. I adjusted the image using de-haze etc. Plus a some cropping to A4 size removed more clutter and positioned the beach to start in the left hand bottom corner. The exposure was so bright that I was unable to get any more texture into the lady’s shorts so they remained rather too dark.
What I should have recognised was that a judge might see this as a record shot from a family holiday rather than an attempt to capture strangers on a beach. I could have used the title to make the situation clearer to a judge.
Perhaps in the back of my mind I was indeed remembering similar scenes when our two daughters were young.