Photo Edit Challenge (Round 1) - May 2020

And another photographic challenge from the Chairman – the Photo Edit Challenge – reaches fulfilment.

A little while ago the Club released five unprocessed images (two jpegs and three RAWs, provided by club members) for download.   Members were then invited to edit these files any way they wished.  “Everything is up to you … be as creative or be as photo-realistic as you want to make the image amazing”.

In short, the challenge was an exercise in post-processing and an opportunity for everyone to explore their own skills and the technical capability of their processing software.  And we were told that the winner of each of the five sections “will receive full bragging rights in perpetuity, with the overall winner receiving a bottle of wine (although you may have to wait until we can safely present it to you)”.

The challenge should have reached its conclusion on Wednesday 6 May when the resulting PDIs were displayed online (via the “new normal” Zoom conferencing) for judging and critiquing.  Such was the overwhelming response, however, that the images displayed on the night were restricted to a single entry per author for each of the five sections.  The remaining entries will therefore be shown and judged at a later date.

At the start of each section, the original image was displayed so that everyone could see the starting point for the transformations that followed.  These originals were:

  • “Ballachulish Sunrise” – a landscape jpeg (taken on a smartphone) donated by Val Bolam;
  • “The Tower” – an architectural jpeg donated by John Booth;
  • “Forever Thine” – a RAW double portrait donated by Lizzie Tingay:
  • “Flower” – a RAW flower study donated by Patrick Linford; and
  • “Playtime” – a RAW wildlife picture donated by Terry Godber.

Collectively these, therefore, covered a range of genres.  And each one presented its own particular challenges.

Our judges for the event were Kathy Chantler ARPS and Alan Taberer (both of Imagez Camera Club, where Kathy is Chairman).  They took it in turns to provide the lead critique on each image and give detailed feedback on the success or otherwise of the processing input.  The various reinterpretations ranged from the extremely realistic to the utterly creative and gave them much food for thought.

At the end of the evening, fifteen images had been held back for further consideration.  This began to challenge the consensus of the two judges.  But, after only disappointingly mild disputation, the ultimate results were:

  • 1st place – “The Tower” by Pam Cruise;
  • 2nd place – “Playtime” by John Curd;
  • 3rd place – “Flower” by Chris Warby;
  • Highly Commended – “Flower” by Sally Kitchingman;
  • Commended – “The Tower” by Mike Kitchingman.
  • Commended – “Flower” by Pam Cruise;

Congratulations to Pam for yet another success.  I hope the wine arrives!