2022 North Cheshire Challenge

Father Brown By Gordon Watson

The North Cheshire Challenge is organised by the North Cheshire Photographic Society and usually consists of two competitions held over a weekend – an interclub print competition and an interclub Digital Knock-out competition. The latter took place on Friday night on Zoom, judged by Terry Donnelly.

In a knock-out competition, about half the images are removed in each round until at round 5 only a few remain and the judge chooses their overall winner. Points are then awarded for the round which an image reaches – 1pt for the first round, 2 pts for the second etc.

Those of us that Zoomed in were treated to a really high standard of images from the 21 Clubs taking part. Terry did a great job judging the competition and provided some excellent and detailed critique. LSAPS finished in a very commendable 5th place with a score of 14pts – congratulations to Kuli Virdee and Gordon Watson whose images reached the 4th round. Southport PS and Wigan 10 shared the top spot on 18pts and Trevor Davenport of Southport had the top image of the night.

Unfortunately there were insufficient entries from the clubs to run the print competition.

Setting The Exposure By Stuart Cahill

LSAPS Studio Equipment

Setting The Exposure By Stuart Cahill

Setting The Exposure By Stuart Cahill

LSAPS owns a number of items of studio equipment which are sadly under-used. Therefore over a couple of weekends in May, some of the council members have been dusting off the equipment and trying to learn how it all works. The idea is that if we set up some studio portrait events, it would be better if a few people actually knew what they were doing. You can judge for yourselves from some of the results shown below. Thanks to Sheila who volunteered to model for the first session and to Ian Mulroy for sharing his knowledge of studio work.

Note that the club’s studio equipment is available to hire free of charge to all LSAPS members, just contact our Equipment Officer Dave Foreman. A full list of club equipment is available on the Equipment Page.

3rd Open Print Competition (2021/22)

The 3rd Open Print Competition of the 2021/2 season was judged on 19th May by Will Stead (CPAGB, EFIAP, PSA3) from Chorley Photographic Society. Will pointed out a few cases where a little dodging and burning could lighten or darken areas of the image for more emphasis or to take down highlights. He also commented that some images came to life under the lighting, and therefore it was important to see the prints properly illuminated.

The top scoring images are listed below. The featured image for this competition is Watchin Waves by Karen Morris, which scored 20pts in the Intermediate Group.


Ready To Preach by Carol Watson

2022 L&CPU Individual Competition

Ready To Preach by Carol Watson

Ready To Preach by Carol Watson

The 2022 L&CPU Individual Competition was judged on the 7th and 8th May, with 3 judges each awarding up to 5 marks for each image. Under normal Exhibition rules, a score of 12pts would be considered an Acceptance. 17 LSAPS Photographers entered a total of 232 images into the Print and PDI competitions, and of these, 7 achieved a score of 12 and above with at least 1 image – Gordon Watson (12), Carol Watson (8), Chris Round (3), Kuli Virdee (3), Anthony Hull (2), Brian Clark (2), Sheila Giles (1). In addition, Carol and Gordon each received a Commended Award for Ready To Preach and Eye Of The Storm. Congratulations to all who achieved an acceptance score.

LSAPS Group Living Dangerously by Mike Halstead

Formby Point Photowalk

LSAPS Group Living Dangerously

We started out on the squirrel walk, in bright sunshine, hoping that one of us would spot a Red Squirrel but, unfortunately, we had no luck. Still the forestry at Formby Point is interesting and we toured the National Trust Reserve taking images of the sand dunes and tall pine trees as we went. Some of the trees, exposed to the strong winds off the Irish sea, have taken on windblown shapes. After a pleasant walk and talk we packed our camera gear away and made our way home to review the images.

Mike

3rd Set Subject Competition (2021/22) – Unloved

The 3rd Set Subject Competition of the 2021/2 season on the subject ‘Unloved’ was judged on 21st April by Rebecca Entwhistle from Prestwich Camera Club. There were a total of 88 entries across Print and PDI, and with many showing various states of decay, this was a difficult subject to judge. Rebecca did point out ways in which each image might be improved, often by cropping or a little tonal adjustments.

The featured image for this competition is On The Outside Looking In by Mike Halstead which scored 20pts in the PDI category.


Oulton Park Photowalk

Oulton Park Photo Walk

Oulton Park provided an ideal backdrop to hone our skills capturing images of racing cars on a test day preceding the Easter race meeting. With very few spectators, other than a few fellow photographers, we explored the circuit looking for the best locations to capture a sense of motion in the speeding cars. The paddock was open which providing the opportunity to wander amongst the cars as they were prepared for the practice sessions. For some members it was the first time taking images of sports cars on a race track, for others it was an opportunity to apply lessons learnt from previous visits. The almost constant stream of cars on circuit gave plenty of opportunity to fill our memory cards. The occasional red flags, to recover cars from the circuit, gave an opportunity to view images on the back of our cameras. Now all we have to do is review the hundreds of images taken and process the chosen few. Happy days.

Mike Halstead

 

2022 L&CPU Annual Club Print Competition

Neighbourhood Watch by Kuli Virdee

The annual L&CPU Club Print competition was held on Sunday 3rd April at the Elm Bank Conference Centre in Eccles. The Print competition involves 18 images from each club – 6 in Open Colour, 6 in Mono and 6 in Nature. Each image is judged by 3 judges, awarding a maximum score of 15pts. Only 15 clubs competed in the Print competition, and Lytham placed 5th in Colour, 5th in the Mono and 8th in Nature, putting us in 6th place overall with a score of 294pts. The competition was won by Wigan 10 with a total score of 324pts.

Congratulations to Kuli Virdee whose Neighbourhood Watch scored a maximum 15pts in Mono, and also to Kuli (again), Carol Watson, Gordon Watson and Andy Dickson who all had images that scored 14pts.

LSAPS Image Scores

2022 L&CPU Annual Club PDI Competition

The Hurdlers By Brian Clark

The annual L&CPU Club PDI competition was held on Saturday 2nd April at the Elm Bank Conference Centre in Eccles. The PDI competition involves 18 images from each club – 12 in Open (Colour or Mono) and 6 in Nature. Each image is judged by 3 judges, awarding a maximum score 15pts. After the Open competition, LSAPS were lying in 7th equal position with 199pts, but dropped back to 12th equal after the Nature round with a total of 295pts. The competition was won by Chorley PS, with a total score of 317pts.

The scoring was relatively generous, and although none of the LSAPS images achieved a top score of 15pts, there were a number which scored a very creditable 14pts.

Congratulations to Brian Clark, Carol Watson, Gordon Watson, Justin Clayton and Kuli Virdee who all had images scoring 14pts in the Open Competition, and to Anthony Hull and Bill Breckenridge who had images scoring 14pts in the Nature Competition.

LSAPS Image Scores