External Competition Selection

There are several annual competitions organised by the PAGB that Chorley PS is invited to contend. These are the pinnacle of uk club photography competitions and all of the top clubs are challenging for the prizes on offer. As a club, we have won four out of the last six competitions and are currently joint holders of both the Digital and Print trophies which is a significant achievement.

To try to avoid any mis-understanding about how we select the images or prints that represent the club, we will share ho we do it and will use the upcoming Digital Championships at Warwick as a vehicle to do this.

The selection is made by 5 club members, who have all expressed an interest in being involved, usually over a 2-3 hour session. This selection team includes photographers who create Nature, Portraiture, Sport and Creative images and we believe it is generally representative of the club’s work.

Each competition has its own set of rules and requirements, here is how the Warwick competition runs.

Selection: Firstly we select a ‘Bank’ of 40 images that our entry will be made from. We typically start by looking at which images did well in the club annual competitions as these have a proven track record - this is why we use try to use the best judges that we can in club comps. Our annual competitions have 3 sections quite deliberately to generate images in colour, mono and nature in line with PAGB competitions. We then go through all member’ s images from last season to make sure that everyone’s images are reviewed. Next, we will look at recent competitions where the images may have been used such as the very recent L&CPU individual competition. Finally we will look at available BPE results to further assess the image’s success rate. This is quite a lengthy process and pretty in-depth but as a team we largely agree on which images will represent the club. Every single member of the club who enters the club’s competitions will have the same opportunity to be selected and we love to use as many people’s images as we can.

There are a number of photographers now featuring regularly who didn’t make the cut a few years ago. So, if you want to be selected the only way is to enter photos at this national standard which is a tough ask but gives the club a chance at national success. There are no reserved places, every image is selected on merit alone.

Round 1: consists of 8 images by no less than 5 photographers & no more than 2 images per photographer. A maximum of 2 Nature images can be used in this round.

This restriction on Nature tends to have a restrictive impact at CPS as we have a strong Nature contingent but can only use a limited number of images.

These 8 images are pre-selected and uploaded to the entry system. These are all scored by three PAGB judges and our selectors will witness the judging of Round 1 and assess which types of images are doing well or otherwise, this will then inform the selection of the 2nd round.

A league table is then produced.

Round 2: A further 8 new images are selected with the same requirements as Round 1.

We select these images from the 32 remaining images in the bank and input them into the entry system. The images are scored and a new league table is created & added to the 1st league table.

The aim is to be placed in the top 8 at this stage as these clubs will compete for the Title of Champions. The remainder of the clubs will compete for the Plate.

It can be quite tactical as we need to select strong enough images to get into the top 8 but also to have enough left in the bank for the Final / Plate.

The Final: 20 images by no less than 5 photographers with no more than 4 per photographer. A maximum of 5 Nature images can be used. We can re-use no more than 10 images from Rounds 1 & 2 combined so 10 new selections are required.

The top scoring images will therefore be re-used within the above constraints and then 10 new ones that we think will score well will be selected.

We don’t share our selection publicly beforehand as we do not want to seen to attempting to influence the judges but we will do so after the event. It’s then in the hands of the judges as how well we will do, we certainly have the knack recently so fingers crossed once again. If you want see how we get on & be a part of it, even if your images are not selected, then grab a ticket & we’ll go down to Warwick in force.

If you have any questions or want to know more please speak to a member of the committee who will be happy to help.

On a sidenote, we tend to enter lots of battles with local clubs and in the ICPA organisation too. When we do enter these other competitions we routinely & deliberately will enter 20 images by 20 different Photographers.