This was the first round the print league at Bracknell Camera Club in the 2022-223 season. This round was for two open images.
My printed entries have waited for almost two years to be judged at the club. “Whatever he said” has been one of my most successful images in International competitions as a PDI, and it was with lots of trepidation that I entered it at the club.
Whatever he said
Graffiti Classics second performance on P&O Oceana was as we left left Split in Croatia way back in 2017. I went to the front rows of the theatre to try and capture some of the energy of their performance. Rather than use a zoom lens I used my EF “Nifty-fifty”.
Summary of judge’s comments
… I do stage photography quite often but I don’t get the opportunity to photograph something like this, I think that you have done a cracking job, I like the diagonal with the hair of the double bass down to the violin at the end, it works quite well
… I like the interaction between the figures, that has also worked quite well
… I can see that you are at an angle on this and you get a good depth of field, that is cracking as well
… there’s mist in the background on the bottom left, that works well as well
… it is quite intriguing all their different poses, and I want to know exactly what he is saying
… now you have taken it down to monochrome, and I feel that these people are really quite well lit, and I wonder just what the colours would have been, had you done a colour image, maybe the colours didn’t sit together well
… but it is unusual for a stage act not to think about the colours they are wearing, but maybe the person who is doing the lighting just wasn’t in your favour on this evening and that is why you have chosen to get it into black and white
… I do like the reasonably tight crop that you have made on the figures as well
… so it is all quite nice, I am now looking at her bow and it is just about to right up his nose isn’t it, maybe that is what you intended
… timings is all with photographs it is a nice straight forward shot, but in terms of composition, in terms of impact it just doesn’t have when compared to the others this evening – eight
Wet Otter (FIAP rules)
This otter was shot on the second day of my visit to a private British Wildlife Centre in Devon organised by Bob Brind-Surch in 2018.
Summary of judge’s comments
… absolutely clean sharp, very well presented, I love his particular otter, we can see all these bits of hair, his fur, absolutely spot on
… it is on a long lens but you have used a small aperture and that has really brought it out [and] quite a lot of the background as well
… I just wonder if you could have used a larger aperture and blurred the background
… the colours look absolutely fantastic and we can see all of the detail in the fur under its chest
… it is a subtle thing but it is disappointing that you’ve got the lump of grass right across its body, could we have seen the whole body? That would have been possibly great
… a really competent effort, just a little bit better if we hadn’t had a bit more blurring of the background and we didn’t have the grass across the front
… eight and a half
The scores
There were XX images in this round in the Print League.
“Wet Otter (FIAP rules)” scored 8.5 and “Whatever he said” scored 8.
[table of scores]
The original images
“Wet Otter (FIAP rules)”:
ISO 640, 1/3200 sec, f5.6, 400 mm
“Whatever he said”:
ISO 500, 50mm, f/1.8, 1/200 sec, -1 compensation