Ron Wake Selection: Amanda Wright reports

Amanda Wright was at last night’s ‘Ron Wake’ at Harrow Camera Club. This is her report:

The Ron Wake was held last night (28th May) at Harrow Camera club judged by Roger Reynolds FRPS APAGB FBPE attended by myself. In this 'all new prints’ competition each club enters 7 prints from 7 different authors and none of the images can have been used outside their club in any external CACC competition. The judge is asked to comment on each image in turn and then select his top 20 from the 49 without scoring or giving a preference. It’s always a very nail biting moment and often images get swapped in and out at the last minute, as was the case last night.

The total numbers chosen from each club were as follows

Watford 5
Harrow 5
Field End 3
Pinner 3
Northolt 2
XRR 1
EHHPS 1

The very last image of the 20 selected was an EHHPS print

I Like This Blue by Amanda Wright

Up until the final moments I thought we weren’t going to get anything in at all as he continued to walk past all of our images.

Roger is very much a nature lover, much travelled and a knowledgable bird man, however, on this occasion his choices were very mixed. He was particularly sensitive to light areas (however small) within an image and also where images were dark he wanted them brightened. He didn’t seem too fond of abstracts and more than once mentioned that images were too big within the frame, he wanted more space around the subject. His other pet hate seemed to be colour casts in both colour and black and white images and often commented on mounts being too small and the prints being too big, much preferring a smaller image in a big mount and the wrong choice of colour mount being used was mentioned once or twice also.

The Final of the competition is held Sept/October in conjunction with Harrow’s annual Exhibition where a different judge will be critiquing the 20 images and choosing his or her overall Ron Wake winner.