The Only Way Is Down :)

Many of you will know that I am a member of a camera club. Now camera clubs often get a bad press online, common complaints are that they have cliques and run lots of competitions. Now as far as I can tell most of the online photographic forums appear to have cliques, and guess what one of the up and coming model/photographer websites runs every week, a competition!

To be fair I have never found any cliques, just people with common interests talking to each other, be it photographing birds on sticks, models, sport or even gadget types who share the same camera brand and lusting after the latest camera/lens. As for competitions, I have found that appraisal and judging of my images by my peers has improved my photography much quicker than any other method I could think of, and it also provides a bit of a boost of motivation.

Now a lot of the things I do with my images lead to letters after my name, of which I have four sets now, and I won’t bother listing or explaining them. Now the thing about letters after your name is using them in the right circumstances. I shall shortly be approaching various places to ask whether I can come and shoot nudes there, when I write to them I shall use all my letters and point them to a new website I am creating with all my best images and listing all the lovely awards I have won, so hopefully they will think I must be famous and let me shoot there :)

So the latest distinction I went for last Sunday was an MPAGB (Master Photographic Alliance of Great Britain), which is the highest distinction you can achieve in UK camera club circles. The guidance says that they are looking for a panel of images meeting the criteria “Highest Standard Of UK Amateur Photography”.

A panel of 20 images is marked by 6 experienced photographers, they do not know who the author is as your images are mixed up with other applicants, and they give each image a mark of between 2 and 5. You need to score a total of 450 which is an average of 22.5 per image. Images should be marked as 4’s when they are likely to get consistent acceptances in exhibitions, and 5’s when they are likely to get regular awards.

All of the images I entered had consistent acceptances in exhibitions, and had won one and usually far more than one awards, and if you read this blog you’ve seen them all before so can scroll to the bottom for the result!

Reflection In Red – 22

Pool of Light – 21

Jump – 26

The Sofa – 24

The Lookout – 17

The Skylight – 22

Pillars – 21

Branches – 19

Alone In The Woods – 22

Blue Angel – 22

Morning Light – 25

The Oasis – 18

Voyeur – 22

Secret Lagoon – 19

En Pointe – 21

So it’s 5 prints to go, and I’m down 16.5 marks from what is required, which is quite a large margin at this stage. En Pointe had only scored 21 and is my most successful ever image (19 acceptances from 20 FIAP exhibitions, with 14 awards from 6 different countries, including 9 gold medals with the latest been last week from Trierenberg). I think it’s fair to say that I wasn’t exactly where I had hoped to be and was beginning to wonder what on earth I had to do to get the high scores that represent images likely to regularly get awards.

Given all that I am not nervous but resigned to whatever will happen. Two fellow photographers who were there, Stuart Crump and Elizabeth Brown, very kindly were doing all the worrying for me either side of me (thank you both), but I had omitted to tell them that I had left what I thought were my best 5 images until last.

The Piano – 27

Camelia – 23

Milky Way – 25

Pearls – 27

Simply Red – 25

Now those of you with good mental arithmetic will see that those marks all add up to 448 and the required total is 450. Now as this is just 2 marks short it is classed as a “near miss” and a review process is undertaken, in their words “this is to recognise that the system of scoring can lead to excessive swings in scores.”. So you can stop holding your breath, after a short review, I passed :)

I was not really confident beforehand as most of the exhibitions I enter are abroad, and the judging was against a UK exhibition standard. Most art-nude photographers I know who enter exhibitions will not enter UK exhibitions because nudes generally do very poorly here. I nearly left En Pointe out, but as it is my most successful image with 9 golds and a near 100% acceptance rate I thought it would be a cop out not to enter it. So while I am extremely happy with the final result, and think the judges did a very good job of marking, I was disappointed that this image got one of my lowest marks, but judging is a thankless task so as always you have to accept their verdict and just mutter under your breath ;-)

A big thank you to the organisers and the judges, there’s quite a lot of effort involved in running these days, and of course a big thank you to the models in order of appearance, Holly (Ivory Flame), Fredau, Raphaella, Joceline, Kayleigh Lush, Madame Bink, Victoria Summers, Nanette McCrone and Katy Cee.

I would highly recommend these distinctions to any camera club members. I achieved my CPAGB in November 2010, my DPAGB in November 2011 and now my MPAGB in April 2013, it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding journey.

The title of the blog post? Well when I saw one of the more experienced and talented members of our club on Monday evening that’s what they said “The Only Way Is Down”, which was meant and taken as a compliment!

P.S. On the medal front as well as hearing about the gold for En Pointe from Trierenberg, I also received a gold medal from The Scottish Salon for The Sofa which was the fourth image in my panel. So quite an exciting week all in!

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