Waverley Camera Club

Entering your images in our competitions is a very good way to learn to take “better” photographs. The word ‘better’ is in quotes because quality in an image is largely in the eye of the beholder – what appeals to one judge may differ from what appeals to another. It is also true that art photographs differ from, for example, family or holiday photographs – a perfectly good family photograph may not make a successful art photograph. But there are some absolute guidelines as to what constitutes a good photograph, and by competing you do learn to take better photographs.

Waverley Camera Club runs a program of monthly competitions within the Club, and also competes several times a year against other clubs in Inter Club Competitions. Some members also enter National and International competitions.

Monthly competitions

Club members are divided into two levels, A grade and B grade. Within each grade are two competitions, printed images and EDI (Electronic Digital Images).

B Grade consists of members who are absolute beginners to members that are up and coming and learning fast. A Grade is made up of newly promoted members through to the very experienced photographer. The idea behind the grades is to allow the beginner and inexperienced photographer to compete in the monthly competitions without having to battle the more experienced. This in effect, attempts to level the playing field giving beginners a good chance to accumulate points and get that valuable feedback.

For all of these monthly competitions a guest judge will provide feedback (concentrating on the B grade images as it is assumed that the A graders already know what they are doing) and will award Merits and Highly Commended’s to any images they feel are deserving of such awards. One image from each competition will also be nominated as a monthly winner.

On a judging night, the guest judge who could be anything from a professional photographer to an art gallery curator, after providing their feedback and awards for the entered images, will usually give a talk and show images on their own field of interest.

Points are awarded as follows:

• Merit award – 2 aggregate points
• Highly commended award – 3 aggregate points
• Image of the Month – 1 additional aggregate point

Promotion from B to A grade is via two routes. The B grader with the highest aggregate in a year will automatically go up to A grade. Additionally any member who accumulates a 30 point aggregate total over the term of their membership will be promoted to A grade.

Email your competition entries to comp@waverleycameraclub.org

2012 schedule

Month	Topic	Entries due by	Judging night
February	Open	Tuesday, 10th January	Tuesday, 7th February
March	Open monochrome	Tuesday, 7th February	Tuesday, 6th March
April	Open	Tuesday, 6th March	Tuesday, 3rd April
May	Open	Tuesday, 3rd April	Tuesday, 1st May
June	Open	Tuesday, 1st May	Tuesday, 5th June
July	Open	Tuesday, 5th June	Tuesday, 3rd July
August	Open	Tuesday, 3rd July	Tuesday, 7th August
September	Open monochrome	Tuesday, 7th August	Tuesday, 4th September
October	Open	Tuesday, 4th September	Tuesday, 2nd October
November	Open	Tuesday, 2nd October	Tuesday, 30th October
December	End of year	Tuesday, 30th October	Tuesday, 4th December

Rules

• Members are in either A grade or B grade
• Members promoted to A Grade part way through the year will still compete in B Grade for the aggregate points award at the end of that year
• A maximum of two printed images can be submitted per member per month
• A maximum of two EDI (Electronically Displayed Images) images can be submitted per member per month
• Entries must be submitted by the first Tuesday in the month prior to the competition
• Entries cannot display the entrant’s name or past awards won (e.g. watermarks on EDI’s / or certificates / names on the back of print mounts)
• Once entered, an image cannot be re-entered in future monthly competitions, irrespective of whether it has been significantly altered with exception of the End of Year Comp
• Printed images are to be mounted, not framed
  • overall size of the mount must not exceed 40cm x 50cm (16″ x 20″) in a vertical or horizontal format
  • thickness of the mount, including backing board, must not exceed 5mm
  • the back of each print must contain an arrow indicating the top of the print, your member number, your grade, and the title of the print
• A digital copy of each printed image MUST also be submitted for projection during the meeting
• EDI entries (and digital copies of printed images) are to be:
  • Submitted via email to comp@waverleycameraclub.org or on CD to competition steward
  • JPEG of 1MB (1024KB) or less
  • no more than 1024 pixels wide and 768 pixels tall (these dimensions can NOT be switched around)
  • Digital images are to be named according to the specified format.

File naming

For 2011 we have changed to a simpler file naming format which should help reduce confusion. The format is:

(your grade)(your member number)-(month)(year)(print or edi)-(title).jpg

Where:

(your grade)	A or B. Please use capital letters
(your member number)	1, 2 or 3 digit member number
(month)	FEB, MAR, APR, MAY, JUN, JUL, AUG, SEP, OCT or EOY . Please use 3 capital letters as you see here, EOY stands for End of Year.
(year)	two digits for the year
(print or edi)	PRINT (if the image is a digital copy of the print) or EDI (if the image is a digital entry). Again, please use capital letters.
(title)	the name of your entry. Please use upper and lower case as you see fit.

When you put it all together it should look like:

• B111-SEP11PRINT-Best Print Ever.jpg
• A2-JUL11EDI-World’s Greatest EDI.jpg

Please note the placement of the 2 hyphens and note also that the only spaces should be in the title.