2023 Inter-Club PDI Championship
This is the national club competition held by the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain (PAGB) at Warwick University Arts Centre each year. It’s a great day out whether you come home triumphant or disappointed…a full day of fabulous images and meeting up with friends from all over the country. Sadly, since the Covid pandemic, the numbers of visitors to the event are fewer than in the past, but hopefully that will improve in future years as the auditorium holds several hundred people.
There are two trophies awarded, the Championship Trophy for the best club and the Plate for the best Runner-up club.
In the first round, all clubs compete against each other with eight images judged by a panel of three judges, each marking out of five, so a total of 15 marks potentially per image.This is our set of first round images.
We had difficult decisions to make after the first round as we had, in our bank, some excellent but dark monochrome images and we had planned a well balanced set in each round, including sport, portrait, nature and landscape. After watching the first round, we decided not to chance our dark monos and also took out one nature image, replacing it with a cute animal picture of a type that seemed to be doing very well. We also took our mono landscape out and replaced it with a portrait. Our second round images were as follows…yep, we were getting too heavy on pictures of Mike and our cute cats image bombed!
After the second round scores were added to the first, we were frustrating lying in 9th place. With the top eight then contesting the final, it meant we had to now compete for the runners up trophy, the Plate.
The Plate Competition
For the Plate, all the clubs below the top eight compete against each other with another eight images, four of which can be chosen from the first two rounds, so we chose images that had scored 14 or 13 in the previous rounds. Sadly, one of the 14s (The Devil) came down to 12 and another one (Girl with Finch) came down to 13 in the Plate. We ended as runners up in the plate, just 2 points behind the winners, Doncaster. Que sera, sera…so now we have the challenge to qualify to enter again next year by doing well in the L&CPU club comps in February/March. Luckily four L&CPU clubs came in the top eight, so that gives us a better chance (as the top eight pre-qualify).
Here is our final round and below, their scores. We ended up with a set of images that was not the balanced set that we intended, only one of Mike but four of Bri. Next year we need much more variety of images if we are to compete against the best in the country.
