[John Hallas]

I entered an image into an internal competition of a local camera club which I have just joined.

The two judges made good comments on most of the 60 shots and were pretty uniform in their voting (it was a ladies v gents comp so all scores to count). I did not score too well and I don't really know why but it is all a matter of opinion so that didn't bother me.

I learnt a lot from the comments, perhaps the most striking points being to ensure that a shot has equi-distance from the edge on all four sides of the image (perhaps that was the judges hobby horse but it did make sense when he pointed it out). The other point was to look around the view finder (or image) and ensure that there are no distractions at the edges of the images.

The one aspect that I did not like was a shot of a hump-backed whale diving into the water, tail in the air. "Straight out of National Geographic" was one of the comments. Fine, it was a good shot but then they slated the image on technical grounds and still gave it almost top marks. Very much a matter of style over content. I have echoed my view here before that it is impossible to take a bad photograph if you are half way up Everest with fantastic scenery all around and I felt tonight that a dramatic shot was given better marks because of the difficulty most of us would have of getting a shot like that rather than for it's technical or compositional merit.

Just a few thoughts of how I saw the evening. Happy to take other peoples views on the matter

John