For Beginners and New members

See club Rules for an explanation of the various competitions.

Don't be nervous, your pictures will be interesting to other people. The judge's comments are intended to be constructive and to help you improve your images. Please remember that the judge only offers his opinion, the rest of the audience may disagree with him. He will often be unaware of the limitations on your viewpoint. The classic comment is to suggest moving to the right for a shot of Beachy Head lighthouse, which would place the photographer in mid air, learning to fly without wings.

Your first entry will normally be in class 3, so that the judge has some idea of your experience, and therefore does not produce a hyper critical analysis of an image which would be useful to an expert but might discourage others. Note that the class entered is the only guide available to the judge. Members names are concealed until after the commentary; this is why you do not put your name on prints.

Images are not given marks. The judge awards places to his favourite images.

Preparing Print Images
Contact the Print Secretary to obtain your identification numbers. These two numbers are used hide your name from the judge. For competitions which allow an entry of two prints per member, use different numbers for each print. For competitions with three prints, one of the allocated numbers is re-used for the third print.

Mount your print in or on a stiff card measuring 50cm. by 40 cm. The club uses boxes this size to store and transport prints; so to reduce the risk of damage caused by prints sliding against each other, the club rules require the card mounts to be this size. The metal frames used at the club exhibition are also this size. The card mount also supports the print when it is placed in the club light box for judging. Once each season a club member organises a bulk order of card and frames and can advise if you wish to mount your print youself.

Label or write on the back of the mount, the title of your image, your membership number, and section. Pack your prints in a portfolio, or similar, which may be marked with your name, and bring them to the club on the 'hand-in' date for the competition you wish to enter. Entries can be handed in early, by previous arrangement with the print secretary, but should not be handed in late.

Digital Images
The club's digital projector and software require images to be a specific maximum size in pixels; 1400 by 1050. Camera images can be reduced to this size using image editing software such as Photoshop. Please remember to save the reduced image under a new filename and as a jpg, or the original image may be lost. Note - the 'pixels per inch' value displayed in the resize window only applies to printed images, and is not used for projected ones. The club equipment is calibrated to achieve the best possible colour fidelity, but all computer equipment interprets colour slightly differently. What you see on your own screen may vary slightly when reproduced on the club equipment. For optimum colour rendition the colour space should be Adobe not sRGB.

The club software uses a specific format for image filenames to identify the title and photographer so images to be entered must be saved with the correct form, or re-named to meet this need.

Title by Photographer.jpg

Image titles also appear on the club website, so special characters such as quote signs in the Title should be avoided, as well as the word 'by'. These can cause problems when transcribing data into these various systems.

The Digital Image secretary will accept images supplied on CD, DVD, USB memory stick or by email. The preferred email address is pdisec@tonbridgecameraclub.org.uk . This address re-directs email to whoever is the current PDI secretary for the season.

Labelling Slides
It is club policy to support slide competitions for as long as a reasonable number of images are entered for each competition. Both 35mm and medium format slides can be entered, subject to club rules about the total number of images per member per competition.

It is preferred that the image title, your name and class are written directly and clearly on the slide mount. Sticky labels may be accepted provided that they are not liable to curl or jamb the projector.

Each slide should have a coloured 'spot' applied to the mount, positioned so that it appears in the lower left corner of the mount when the slide is viewed with the image appearing upright, and the correct way round (ie as it will appear on screen). It is not always the projectionist's fault if a slide is shown wrong way round, or upside down. If in doubt ask the Slide secretary to show you a correctly labelled slide.

Hand In dates
For most competitions the 'hand-in' date is two weeks before the competition date. This allows time for the secretary to unpack all the images and check that they are correctly prepared. The images are sorted into a display order, semi-random, and two lists of titles are then prepared for each class, one with photographers names, one without, in display order. The unnamed list, with the images, is delivered to the judge for his preview ( not all judges will preview however). The second list is used to record marks scored , and read out photographer's names on competition night.

Disclaimer
These guidelines are based on the club rules document, but if errors have crept in, the clubs rules apply not the above.