Competition News

News from the latest round of the SPA competition held at Mid Sussex Camera Club, Burgess Hill . I would like to thank both Dennis and Richard Western for representing Malden Camera Club at this event. Richard has been kind enough to provide this report on the proceedings

24.02.09

Since I don’t think the results of our match yesterday evening made it to the morning News, and we were too late for the papers’ deadlines you probably don’t know the result.

I am pleased to say we won both prints and slides, both by a handsome margin. You would have been proud of your members for their work. You would not of course have been proud of them for their support because it was only Dennis and I flying the flag, but our “away” support has been dwindling for a while, and all the stalwarts bar us had good reasons for being unavailable.

The prints result was 87.5 v 82 in our favour, with their print winning the star, although bizarrely not one of the 10’s. Steve Lawrensen, the judge, and a very good and entertaining one he was last evening, says it is not a requirement that the star must be a 10.

Mind you, he very much liked John’s “Fading away” and Chris’ “Winter oaks”, and I thought he was going to give the star to Duncan’s “Gehry building”, all of which scored 10s, but he did think Duncan had been over-familiar with the sharpening tool on “Red tie”, which set the scene for the evening with an 8, and he made some silly comments about Nadal’s eyes not looking at the ball, having said he was definitely not a “sports” judge and had no interest in tennis, resulting in an 8.5. Unfortunately they did not display the pictures, as we do, and they pulled them off the pile in the order in which we had brought them in the box, i.e. alphabetical order except for the two “extras”.

“Hot work” only got an 8 so it needs to be compared with “Joceline” and “Atmosphere Valley” before the Elimination round.

They had no 10’s, only a 9.5 and then two 7’s, both early on, and a 7.5 later while ours were all being held back, so their cause was fairly hopeless!