Between the 10th and 11th October 2014 LPS held their annual exhibition at St Elli Shopping Centre. Each year we invite a guest judge to pick out the best images and award “Best Colour Print” and “Best Monochrome Print”. This year we asked Gary Shinner to do the honours. Gary spent some time looking through the 60 images and concluded his judging with a very thorough report.
Judge’s Report
I was kindly asked to judge the LPS annual exhibition in the Elli shopping centre. It’s safe to point out that LPS did themselves proud to advertise their existence and the talented bunch of photographers that they are. The exhibition was well displayed and they even managed to advertise themselves really well and I trust that any new potential members will be interested enough to consider joining them or another photographic club fraternity in South Wales.
Joe Public will invariably choose images that they like for personal tastes and as ‘eye candy’, but the discerning eye of a photographer or artist will and can see things differently. As asked to judge I did find the overall standard very high although colour out flanked monochromatic images by a majority of probably 7-1, but this is par for the course.
I think for most exhibitions with a majority of club’s feel they have to play safe when putting out images on display that may advertise a unique skill set. It did seem that a high percentage of images were landscape or travel type images, but it must be said that these were quite pleasing to my eyes as well, and of a good standard.
LPS reconvened to decide what they required from me, and the end result was to pick a Clear outright Mono Winner & thus do the same for the colour section as well, but including a few HC’s in the process as well. I tried my best to pick only 2 HC’s per category but as the colour section proved to a difficult task.
Best Monochrome Print
I choose for the Mono winner to #54 “Still Standing Proud”, this was a great image of Whitford Lighthouse and shows how photogenic this structure is, and was done very well with a great deal of detail leading into the image central subject, the foreground had great detail & in the actual lighthouse itself, and the convention of breaking rules by sticking the item in the very centre works, with a great vast sky.
I gave out a further 2 HC’s in the mono’s the first was for the #52 “Double Header” – a lovely image showing the good old steam loco’s coming over the 11 Arches from a great vantage point. The other was for the #17 “Mist in the morning” a well captured image of another local image which looked like a high vantage point looking over the valley of the Technium centre in Dafen. Well seen and taken.
Best Colour Print
Now the Colour section was far harder to deal with. In the end the winner I Plumped for was #13 “Wild Horses, a lovely scene with a glorious setting show how fortunate you have to be in the right place at the right time, the horses all placed in the sunlight stripped worked brilliantly, with the recession working towards the farmstead as the base of the mountains, with these huge mountains in the changing light and mist works brilliantly – bravo to the Photographer. Fab capture.
The HC’s in the colour were in the end three images. The first was # 22 “Urban Rock” fab capture of the guitarist jumping up in the air with his guitar with a real great industrial background. #18 Vik – Iceland. Ere feel to this coastal scene with some wonderful colours in the image another pleasing capture on an area we haven’t seen a great deal of until the last few years. Last HC was #57 ‘Rust In Peace’, I saw this image as a well seen image and was quite different to vast majority of images in the LPS exhibition. My, sort of style, in recent years!!
In retrospect, I also found these other images to be up there with the rest of them.
#11 Reflections of the Shard
#5 Front to back
#1 Evening Glow in Edinburgh
#39 Blow
#25 Flyby
#20 Whitford lighthouse
#36 Val D’Orcia Tuscany
#60 Worms head Sunset
#37 Entering Geiranger Fjord
(The above list is in no particular order)
One thing I will say the ethos of an exhibition is to advertise the club, and if you a successful winner during the exhibition then happy days for that author, I’m also pretty sure that on a different day and different judge or members of the public will produce a different set of results.
Thanks LPS for asking me to judge your annual exhibition, if I can be of any future assistance, please ask me, I’ll only be too willing to help out.
LPS would like to thank Gary for his time and feedback. It’s very much appreciated.