I have just returned from a very entertaining and informative day at the L&CPU judging seminar. The day was set up for people were interested in becoming judges or those who want to find out more about the judging process.

Christene Widdall opened the procedures with a lecture about the principles behind judging. It was very interesting to hear the perspective of experienced  judges. All of us have experienced judges we disagree with or don’t rate very highly and Christene’s talk covered all aspects of what makes for a good and bad judge. The key message was to respect the work of the individual and always find something positive to say, then offer constructive criticism in order to inform and help the author improve their work.

Quite a lengthy debate ensued over the subject of marking images. All of the judges expressed their dislike of providing marks for images; Gordon Jenkins feels so strongly about this matter that he said he will not be judging next year. However, the message was clear that the judge should work within the requirements of the individual  club regardless of personal opinions. There are many different approaches to the way that different clubs run competitions and it was suggested that the L&CPU publish a summary of the different ways that clubs approach competitions to give them the opportunity to analyse their working practice.

We then split into groups to work with the experienced judges  to offer our opinions on images presented to us. At the end of each session the judges made notes about the responses of the delegates. This was a very interesting task and over the course of the exercise it was interesting to notice the change of the weighting of people being critical about images swing toward them finding positive aspects. It was definitely more challenging to find positives about the weaker images as opposed to the clear favourites. Anybody fancy the prospect of critiquing one of Christene Widdall’s images with her in ear shot? Ohhh errr!

We then finished the day with the bravest amongst us standing up infront of the whole group to give feedback on an image. We chose an image that we had seen during the day and gave our comments as if we were judging it as part of a competition. About half of the group chose to take part in this activity.

The judges will now go away an deliberate over their notes to determine who they will invite to include on the judging list.

Many thanks to Christene for all her work preparing the day and her guest judges for help and advice during the day.

Darrell

Quote of the day:

“Better to keep your mouth shut and appear ignorant than open it and remove all doubt.”

Mark Twain