The first competition of the new calendar year is the Panels Competitions which normally comprises of two competitions, PDI and Print, run on the same night. Now you know what's coming next - this season is different for one or two well know reasons ...
This year we, therefore, only held a PDI competition! Traditionally (or so it seems while I have been a member) the panel competitions are not usually very well represented even though members are limited to one panel per media - when I first started entering competitions I was advised to try my luck at the print comp because not many people enter because of the hassle of having a number of images to be printed and mounted. This advice paid off as on my first attempt there were only nine entries and fortune seemed to be well and truly on my side because I won the intermediate section. I've not done so well since but I suppose that is how it goes sometimes. You just have to keep plugging away.
Anyway, back to this years competition! With only the PDI comp open members were allowed to submit up to two panels. Our judge for this year was Sue Hartley and, as with all competitions this year, the images were sent to the judge prior to the Tuesday nights proceedings. To make sure Sue knew the 'brief' for our competition she was sent the rules which states:
Each PDI panel entry is to comprise of a single jpeg digital image file, in sRGB Colour Space, and which must incorporate a minimum of three (3) and a maximum of six (6) individual images.
The images must be suitably related, must be able to ‘stand on their own’ as images, and can be on any subject or theme of the author’s choosing.
There can be no overlapping of the individual images in the panel: Each must be fully visible and unobscured by the neighbouring images.
Scoring:
Panels will be judged on their merits as complete, unified panels by an external assessor (competition judge).
So there you have it - that is what the panels were judged upon!
In a previous post when we had an evening on how to put a panel together I said that if the judge noticed anything wrong they would point it out and sure enough Sue did - and that is exactly what we asked her to do. Although the comments were mainly centred around the individual images being able to 'stand on their own' or not. Not that the images were technically incorrect in exposure or composition, the judge just didn't seem to feel they could stand on it's own.
Other comments indicated that 'less is more' - three images would have told the same story as four, five or six. So whilst the additional images were pleasing to view, the overall impact was seen to have been better with fewer images.
Relative size and position of images within the panel also raised a few comments.
So, with my previous guidelines and those given by Sue Hartley here we should all be getting 19s - because sadly there can only be one 20.
Congratulations go to David Powell for winning the Intermediate section and Nick Hopwood for winning the Advanced section.
And, as always, a special thank you to Sue Hartley for spending the time to preview our panels and pass judgement on the night.
25 January 2021
