What a lot we have to report from the last month…
On 7th and 8th March, the L&CPU Annual Club Competitions were held at St Mary’s Parish Centre, Devonshire Road, Chorley. This is a three judge event; each judge marks each image out of 5, which are then combined to give a total for the piece of work out of 15. Our thanks to the judges, who were: Peter Gennard MFIAP, EFIAP/d3, Sue O’Connell FIPF, MPSA, EFIAP/d3 DPAGB, ABPE and Peter Brisley EFIAP, DPAGB, BPE2, who did an outstanding job throughout the weekend.
On Day 1, the PDIs were scored and Oldham PS came third, behind Chorley and Southport. On the second day, the Prints were scored and OPS came third behind Poulton-le-Fylde and Chorley. When PDI and Print scores were added together (for 24 prints and 24 PDIs), our final placing was, guess what? THIRD! behind Club champions Poulton-le-Fylde, who pushed Chorley onto second place.
While the club positions are used to prequalify the top 2 clubs to enter the national (PAGB) Club PDI and Print Challenges in July and October respectively, we had already prequalified by coming in the top 8 nationally last year, so it didn’t actually matter, but it was useful to try out some new work for our preparatory banks of images.
With 48 pieces of work judged, they can’t all be shown here, so please enjoy a few of our top marked works, all receiving scores of 13 to 15.
Adrian Deaville Competiton
The Adrian Deaville competition is held each March between the four clubs of Oldham and Rochdale. This year, entries were accepted from three of the clubs and again, Oldham PS came out winners, using a subset of the images entered for the L&CPU Annual Club Competitions.
PAGB GB CUP (Open and Nature)
The PAGB Cup requires an entry of up to 24 images in each section, Open and Nature, which are run as two separate competitions, but with a single panel of three judges. We chose again from our bank of current images, using some from the L&CPU Annual selection, but replacing a few. What a difference in scores! Some of the images that we had used before, lost up to 5 marks from the L&CPU event to the PAGB one. When the marks were in, the selectors (Mike and Christine) were dismayed. It would be a few days before the final club positions would be available, but judging from our marks, we predicted a bit of a disaster! Fortunately, the way the club positions are worked out for this pair of competitions is not a total score, as in the L&CPU, but they take the best 12 scores and combine those, so the lower marks are discarded.
Imagine our shock and surprise to find we had been placed SECOND behind Southport PS in the Open Competition and equal THIRD in the Nature Competition behind Chichester Camera Club and Cambridge Camera Club. In the Open Cup, Eddie Leach gained three awards for his gymnastics pictures – well done Eddie! They are shown with our other work that was selected for the PAGB Exhibition, and are the first three in the gallery below:
