The regional club competitions start each year with the Cambridge Digital Inter-Club Competition and it’s always a good chance to meet up with old friends and photographers from other clubs and see some of the best images from around the region. This year was the first in person meeting for a few years because of the effects of covid and those effects were still evident. Normally 35 clubs compete with a waiting list and there have been up to 190 visitors but this year numbers were down with only 27 clubs entered and only around 60 external visitors, but it was still a good meeting.

The Cambridge club are very well organised the competition runs very smoothly, and their catering team provide very good cakes. There are five rounds, Mono, People, Landscape, Nature, and Open, each image is marked out of 20 and the highest scoring club is the winner.

Ralph Duckett MPAGB EFIAP APAGB, from Staffordshire had the hard job of judging this year. He has been a member at Burton on Trent Photographic Society for over 40 years. An experienced PAGB judge, he gave concise and useful comments with good humour on each image and awarded very high scores to many of them, his opinion being that the standard was very high. Ralph awarded 37 images with full marks of 20/20 and this gave him a very difficult job to select his overall winning image. He whittled these down to a final 7 images but then threw it out to the audience to help him select the winner – not the most conventional way to pick a winner but this ended the afternoon with at least the winning photographer happy!

 Five members from NDPS went along to observe the competition. Two of our 5 images scored 20 and overall, we ended with 94 points, out of 100, putting us in equal 8th place slightly down on last year but still a result we were very happy with. Top club was Photographic Imaging Co-Operative (PICO) with 99, second was Welwyn Garden (98), third North Norfolk Photographic Society (97).

Next up are the St Ives Interprint and the EAF Championships. If you get the chance to go along and watch the judging it is recommended as it gives you a good feel for the standard of work in the region and will inspire your own photography.

 Review by Dave Balcombe ARPS & Joan Jordan ARPS