Dawlish & Teignmouth Camera Club kicked off the new season with the First Open Competition. A total of 63 digital images were submitted giving judge, Ian Hosker from Sidmouth Camera Club, a tough job of critiquing each one and then selecting worthy winners.
It proved a particularly challenging task when he was faced with such a variety of genres – from flora and fauna taken at macro level, to freezing sporting action with fast shutter speed, and from abstract architectural compositions to illusory representations created by intentional camera movement.
To his credit, Ian awarded prizes to just over 25% of entrants and you can now view all the winning images here.
There were two Gold winners – Howard Sheard with his magnificent night photography image Milky Way over Start Point and Dave Hutton with his image A Trial, showing a honey bee on Comfrey taken at the allotments in Dawlish.
Howard described how he got his shot “I visited Start Point with two other club members on a night chosen because of the position and angle of the Milky Way and it was forecast to be a cloudless night. The conditions were all we had hoped and planned for. My print is a horizontal panorama created from nine individual portrait images taken with overlapping sides and stitched together in Lightroom”.
Dave explained that thanks to a wonderful free loan service provided by Fuji, he was able to borrow a Fujinon XF80mm F2.8 macro lens (which retails around £1000) for 48 hours. He then set up a wildlife recording scheme on the allotments and experimented with the macro lens taking photos of plants, bees, hoverflies and butterflies. He recalled “I watched several plants which attracted bees and other pollinators and noticed how this bee was getting to the nectar by piercing the petals, a behaviour called 'nectar robbing'.” Another of Dave’s images – this time of a hoverfly - was awarded Bronze.
The winners for the First Open Competition:
Gold – Howard Sheard, Dave Hutton
Silver – Kevin McDonagh, Alex Rosen, Tejas Earp, Ken Holland
Bronze – Graham Eteson, Tony Wilson, Robert Kent, Robert Normand, Marc Dunlop, Dave Hutton
Highly Commended – Alex Rosen, Bob Clowes, Robert Kent, Nigel West, Kevin McDonagh x 2, Tejas Earp, Gwynneth Chubb