"You are the Judge" with Ian Bateman

PPC were pleased to play host last night to the thoroughly entertaining Ian Bateman and his travelling workshop "You Are The Judge". With the audience broken down into 9 groups of 5 people each, the idea was for each group to judge the same 20 photos in a tightly timed 20 minutes. As we found out, that is not as easy as it sounds and even within a group, scores could and did vary dramatically. When the results were reviewed later in the sesdion, it was not unusual to see scores, which were out of a maximum of 20 points per image, ranging between 12 - 20. What this demonstrated was that it's not easy judging other people's work, let alone come up with constructive criticism that  helps the photographer move forward. After the judging, Ian asked for the reasons behind the scores from each groups spokesperson. He also outlined how well each image had done in previous competitions. Interestingly, the image achieving the best result overall was one from 30 years ago, a 35mm colour slide of a landscape scene converted to a print. A good image is a good image irrespective of how or when it was taken. An extremely stimulating evening, considered one of the best the club has run by many of the attending club members. A huge thanks to Ian Bateman for allowing us the opportunity to share, even if for a brief time, the role of the judge