Rules Amendments for WCC Competitions

Just to follow up on the President’s email, here a re a few points from the new competition rules for 2009.

As you all should know by now there has been some changes to the competition rules (A and B grades, 2 entries instead of three) and now the committee have introduced a couple more.

The first and most significant change is to the deadline.

Instead of the competition entries being due at the 3rd Tuesday workshop night, they will now be due anytime up to the competition PRIOR to the one you are entering. For e.g. If you want to submit entries to the June competition, they would be due no later than the 5th May’s competition night.

Entries for the May competition are still due on the 21st of April, this change will come into effect for the June competition onwards.

The reason for this is that there are now more camera clubs than ever before, with more members than ever before (and increasing memberships at that) putting in more comp entries than ever before. The judges, whose numbers haven’t swelled accordingly, are being inundated with requests and are, quite simply, swamped. As a committee we felt that more time given to the judge could only be of benefit to all concerned. Until now Waverley have given the judge a week to 10 days to do their critiquing before coming in to the club. Adding two weeks to that not only releases a little of the pressure we place on Albert and Peter to collate all the entries as soon as possible but should result in more considered commentary from the judge, which is, after all, the point of the competition in the first place.

The second change is that from now you must submit a digital copy with every print that you enter.

The reason for this is that we will be using the back room for the judging and putting the prints up around the front room for perusal before the judging starts. It’s too much trouble to run between the rooms grabbing prints for the judge to comment on so we decided that we would display the digital copy of the print instead. One immediate benefit of doing it this way is that from now on everybody should be able to see the (digital) print. Reflections from the lights overhead will not be a problem.

The file naming covention will be almost the same as for the EDI comp – just put a P (for print) between WCC and your grade.
For example B graders will be: WCCPB-0609-25B-Title.

The third item is conformation of the new aggregate scoring system.

No longer will a judge be required to give a score out of 15 (except for 4 Club). Instead a judge will be asked to award as many merits and highly commended awards as the judge feels are warranted. The judge will be asked to nominate one entry from each of the four sections as the best of the month.

  • Every entry receiving a merit will get 2 aggregate points.
  • Every entry receiving a highly commended will get 3 aggregate points.
  • Each entry nominated as the best of the month will receive 1 extra aggregate point.

For the end of the year aggregate awards the winner will be the person in each section (A prints, B prints, A EDI and B EDI) with the most aggregate points.

In the event of a tie the winner will be the person who received the highest number of highly commendeds.

If things are still tied the winner will be the person who received the most nominations as the best of the month.

For the annual aggregate competition these aggregate points will reset to 0 at the start of each calendar year.

A person will be promoted to A grade once they have accumulated 30 aggregate points. This person does not have to accumulate all of these points in one calendar year. For promotion purposes a record will be kept of how many points a person has accrued since joining the club.

If a B grader accumulates enough aggregate points to be promoted to A grade before the July comp then that person shall immediately be promoted and shall carry over any aggregate points earned in that calendar year. If a B grader accumulates enough aggregate points to be promoted any time from the July comp onwards then that person’s promotion shall be held over until the start of the next calendar year.