10 Topics, 20 Photographs, 24 Hours

Last Friday and Saturday, 4-5 October 2013, our photo club had its 3rd Annual Photo Rally. What it comes down to is that at the start you are given 10 topics to photograph, and in the next 24 hours you have to hand in 2 photographs on each topic. No photographs may be altered after it has been taken, whether in or out of camera. Photographs must rely completely on settings before the photo is taken. Further, no photos were to be taken after 16:00 (4PM) on 5 October.

It may seem easy to take 20 photos in 24 hours, but when you have to fit all this into normal life, it becomes a little tricky. These photos will be judged at our next monthly meeting.

I won’t bore you with the descriptions of each topic, so here are the pics according to topic:

Into the sun
Creative Self-Portrait
Trees
Childhood memory
Faceless Portrait
H2O
White
More than one (Patterns)
Happiness
Hungry

Apart from the above, there were a few my wife and I liked. Together we liked:

ManInTheMirror

Then, my wife liked:

HalfOfMe

And finally, I liked:

CornerHead

All-in-all, it was a fun 24 hours, and would do it again!

Judging photographs is not easy

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:

 

photographer_star_grading

 

Continue reading