Photographic Alliance of Great Britain. The 2008 GB cup.

SPF New Projected Image Championship.

 This was the first of a new breed of photo competition run by the SPF, previously and for many years it was the Scottish Slide Championship but this alas is no more. Now it’s the Projected Image Competition. This was done in recognition of the change in technology as more photographers are now seeing the benefits of digital photography and forgoing the traditional film methods. However the first of these competitions wasn’t entirely film free. Of the 1145 images on show, 881 were digital images and 264 were 35mm slides.  

 The competition took place in Grangemouth Town Hall on Sunday the 24^th of February. 32 clubs from all over Scotland were represented coming from exotic locations between Dingwall and Dumfries and as far flung as Milngavie.

 Allan Gawthorpe the SPF president again started the proceedings and introduced the three judges from the north of England. These were
Gwen Charnock FRPS, EFIAP/s
Phil Charnock FRPS, EFIAP/s
Keith Suddaby MPAGB,EFIAP

 The show got under way at 10am with the digital images coming first. The show which was run under PhotoShop was quite slick compared with the print show earlier in the year. John Coyle was announcing the titles of each entry which invoked a bit of humour as he tried to master the intricate nature of Scottish place name and the latin names of birds and beasts.

 Generally the show was a very colourful one, the colour images far outdoing the monochrome ones, but then, back in the Slide Championship days, Monochrome shots were a novelty.  The traditional shots of Rannoch Moor and Buchaille Etive Mhor where down but were replaced with misty shots of boat houses and the Clyde Span or the ‘squinty bridge’ in Glasgow –I had noted at the time ‘Lots of the Squinty Bridge’.  Autumnal shots were very popular and it has to be said a fair number of the images were quite classy. I felt the scoring was higher generally than the print championship but the images were for the most part of a high standard too. As is the nature of this type of competition the images tailored for this fast image appraisal did really well. What I appreciated was the simpler framing style of the images compared with prints most were simply the image and nothing else.

 Funny or off the ball images were popular too, and it was good to see something to break the serious image making shots we are so used to seeing.  Nature images were good too, although some didn’t score too well I felt they were one of the strong points of the entry. To quote someone next to me there were  ‘umpteen birds on twigs’ A few shots really came out, one was a Tawny Owl in flight within a snow shower, and another was a Cuckoo being fed by a Meadow Pippin which was in flight. One of my favourites was a profile monochrome shot of a silverback gorillia – just of his head, very powerful it was.

Portraits were a favourite as well, those from Ron Wheelan and Simon Allen were amongst the strongest and scored well. Many were shots of the Edinburgh Festival and the Mask festival in Venice. Quite a few nudes were scattered around much to John Coyle’s delight..

The audience at 1st Projected Image Competition. The entry for the show was its normal size but the audience was down on numbers this year. Jim Meek hides his face for Social Security reasons..

Landscapes were there in abundance, sandy beaches up north to mountain shots, evening seascapes to close ups and lovely panoramas. It really is hard to beat the Scottish landscape on a good day, I suspected there was a trip to Bryce canyon in the USA , lots of the amazing rock structures there. A few impressionist images were presented one of which reached the final.

 The day was split into three main parts and despite the large volume of images it went by with ease. In fact we did finish early. Lunch time and Townend members escaped to a local hotel and had a beer and great meal and had a frank and free exchange on how the day had gone so far.

As with the nature of art it can be so easy to overdo things and this was apparent in some of the images, mostly those who frame for framing sake and those who overblurred backgrounds. If you can detect what was done to a shot it has been rumbled and it turns into a technical exercise rather than an art form.  

The final section was the showing of the slides and it was no real surprise to see that a number of these were originally digital images transferred over to a slide. Digital filters, framing of the images could be seen on quite a few of them. Still, there were a few film slides too.  A point came up and that was the presentation of the images, digital projectors are designed to show images full size horizontally whilst film projectors allow an image to be shown full size both horizontally and vertically. Digitial portrait shots are therefore shown much smaller than a film based portrait. Landscape images are about twice the size in image area. Maybe we need digital projectors that project a square rather than a horizontal rectangle.

 Townend Camera Club I think came just outside the top 10 overall. I did manage to note the scores of every one of our twenty entries.

Alan Kempster’s ‘Frog in Spawn’ achieved 14 points out of a maximum of 15, Excellent stuff ,Alan! Of course I would like to thank everybody who put in an entry too. Thank you and well done.

 After all the images were shown the top scoring images, those scoring 13, 14, or 15 points were taken aside and judged again to get the winners of the event. During this time the scores for each club were totalled up to see who was the top scoring club. The pictures here show the judges assessing the slides on a light box and then selecting their favourites the commended and highly commended as as well as the top slide.

Then it was onto the final selections of the digital images, following much the same procedure as above but with less chance of spilling your coffee. Neil Smith and Allan Gawthorpe look on as the judges mull things over with a hot beverage and some lovely biscuits.

 Here are the official scores the top 6 in the slides and the top 10 in both the Digital images and the combined scores.