At the start of this year I decided to take photography a little more serious than I had up till then. So, I decided to join a photography club. I joined the National Photographic Club of South Africa here in Pretoria.
As a newbie in photography I had to start as a 1 Star photographer. There are 5 star levels for photographers. Once you become a 5 Star photographer, you need to move up the 5 Star ranks of 5 Star Master Bronze to 5 Star Master Platinum. And, of course, this doesn’t happen overnight. To move from 1 star to 2 star a total number of 30 judging points have to be accumulated and at least 7 gold or certificate of merit (COM) awards, where COM = 5, gold = 3, silver = 2 and bronze = 1. This is explained in the table below:
Up until the present, I have submitted photographs at 3 monthly meetings of the club, where accomplished 5 Star photographers from outside the club and occasionally from inside the club are used to officiate at the judging of submitted photographs. I have altogether submitted 9 photographs of which 6 were judged as gold. I need one more gold and 6 points to move up to 2 Star level.
Here are the pics I submitted by month:
March
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April
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May
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The problem with all this judging is that when I start thinking about submitting pictures for the next meeting, after hearing all the comments about all the different photographs that were submitted before, I become more critical about my work myself, and then I find it difficult to decide which pictures I want to submit! Hopefully that will make me a better photographer!
William Dicks Photography 
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