Judging this year's competition was Jay Charnock FRPS, a longtime member of the Group with vast experience as a photographic judge.
Introducing her comments she explained how she approached the task:
'The rule, or better, the conventions of photography, like composition, are not always the most important thing. After you’ve considered them, whether you’ve ‘obeyed’ them or not, your output is an image, and how you react to that image depends on who you are.
It's a purely subjective exercise. So I've chosen photographs which speak to me. So what am I looking for? I'm looking for a bit of photographic perfection in there, and that is the right sort of composition, you're doing the right thing, whatever that is.
After that it comes to how the image affects me as a person. Because it affects every one of you in a different way. Because you are bringing to these pictures all your prejudices, all your foibles, all every manner of things to do with your personality.
So how you react to it is who you are. It's a subjective exercise. I've chosen those pictures which speak to me. What do they speak of? As travel images they must have a sense of place, okay. And they all have a that, and they have a spirit place, a sense of what you're looking at.
These are images that speak to me somehow a bit more deeply, okay? A sense of place and a spirit of place. Now that's defined by you, who you are, how you actually observe the photograph, and how you react to it.
So these are my personal choices, and I make no excuses. I've chosen these images because they spoke to me. When you look at a photograph, you are looking at it subjectively. Okay, you could look and say, oh, rubbish. That's actually a rubbish composition. Look at those wonky lines there. But ultimately, how does it feel? And that to me is important.'
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL
