The ability of a judge to participate in a competition from the west highlands is surely one of the few pluses of Covid and the need to work online. Keith Thorburn, plus cat and dog was able to adjudicate all the way from Kinlochleven. Which is pretty cool.
The winners were Alison Cameron, Andy Coulson and Elaine Dowding , in that order. Well done all.
It's important to stress that competition photography has rules and standards to which judges adhere. There's always a subjective element of course, but technical comments and criticisms are mostly predictable. Many of the comments Keith made tonight are reflected here and it's worth looking through the images there.
The only way to convey to a judge what effect you tried to achieve is by the title and the image itself, so it's important the title reflects the content. (Don't be too clever or obscure. The judge is under no obligation to Google your title to see if there's a hidden reference there. ) It's important to ensure the image fits the category- a photo of a cow might fit "Flora and Fauna" or "Portraiture", but in the latter case it has to be an actual portrait, not a herd of cows in a field.
Club competition photography is a learning process. Mostly it's about learning how to take good competition photos. That will help you take good photos generally- even if the photos you want to take are not themselves "competition" shots.
A big thanks to Keith for the many useful and pertinent comments. It's encouraging to see so many good images, too. The club may be small, but there's some fine photographers in it.
Incidentally- as Keith said, he likes to see the metadata , which is normally stripped out by converting raw to Jpg files. So do some other judges. Or you may want to do so for other reasons. It seems (thanks Ian) that Photoshop only gives 2 options- 'no metadata' or 'copyright data and contact info'. If you want to keep EXIF data from Photoshop, it seems you have to go via Bridge. Open your files in PS, then File/ Browse in Bridge. With Bridge open, select Tools/Photoshop/Image Processor. Then select the file type, where to save , jpg quality and hit RUN. I never even opened Bridge before. It all seems a bit cack handed. If anyone knows a simpler way to export EXIF data from Photoshop, do let us know.