Irvine Camera Club welcomed back (virtually!) a good friend and excellent judge this week, Andy Stark from Kilbarchan, for our first print competition of the season.
The challenge to produce good quality photographic prints requires our members to use a totally different skill set from that needed to create images for the screen. They need to think about paper quality, sizing and mounting. Should they print the images themselves or prepare files to send to a professional lab? All of these choices and skills require time and effort to execute successfully. The reward from all the extra work is the joy of having a large, high quality, print of your work to hold and admire. It is something tangible. A physical object rather than just another image in amongst the millions of others that flash up on the screen every day.
I am happy to say that once again our members excelled themselves in both our colour and monochrome print sections. Andy certainly had his work cut out to get through them all in one evening! In this week’s paper we are looking at the best of the monochrome prints as selected by Andy. Michele Campbell excelled, taking the top two places with her gorgeous studio portraits “We’ll Meet Again” and “Contemplation”, which Andy admired for their attention to detail, lighting and find print quality. Completing the top 3 was our beginning photographer and rapidly rising star, Tracy Ross, with her “Pandemic Pit” – a stunning architectural underground photograph displaying fantastic use of symmetry.
Along with our winners there were several prints that Andy had identified as being contenders but didn’t quite make it into the top 3. I’ve included some of those for you to see here. I hope you enjoy the images. Hopefully sometime in the new year we will be able to exhibit prints once again and you’ll be able to see some of the originals in all their glory.
In the meantime, if you would like to join a friendly and progressive little camera club we are continuing to meet weekly on Zoom. You can find all of our detail at www.irvinecc.co.uk or on the various social media platforms.
