Exhibition!

I spent much of last weekend helping with the preparation for Cambridge Camera Club’s 2025 exhibition. I had believed it to be a fairly labour intensive and involved activity and I was not wrong.

This weekend was when most of the work would be done: sorting the entries ready for the judging, then the judging and finally and based on the results working out how the 200 plus prints would be displayed.

The judging was done by three independent judges (all of a certain age and gender) who had about half a minute to rate each entry 2, 3, 4 or (exceptionally 5) on an iPad. They rattled through colour then black & white and then ‘nature’ in about 2 hours.

I’m a bit puzzled about the judging and suspect that it’s not accurate and that run again many of the 10s would be 11s and vice versa. But it’s the way it is and any imperfections and inbuilt bias are the same for everyone.

It meant lots of prints scored 11 or more and a fair number scored 10. All of the former were selected for the exhibition and then judgements were made to ‘promote’ some of the latter to add balance and to ensure that every entrant got at least one entry accepted.

There’s also a PDI exhibition and entries for this were also judged in substantially the same manner although there isn’t the same limitation on numbers because they would be projected as a rolling display.

I entered six images into each exhibition, three colour and three black and white in each. After the judging and benefiting from a couple of promotions I ended up with three exhibits in the print section (one black and white) and four in the PDI section (another black and white) one of which scored a 12 (see the featured image above) with one judge giving it 5!

Of course I’m miffed about the rejections but reckon that one was justified. The others I’ll accept as exemplifying the imperfection implicit in the process!

All of the images I submitted are shown in the gallery below. Come along to the exhibition, 27 Oct -1 Nov at the St Andrew’s St Baptist Church in Cambridge between 1300 (1000 on Saturday) at 1700 to see the successful ones.