The first of our assignment competitions provided the subject matter for this week’s meeting of the IOM Photographic Society.

The assignment was ’scapes’, meaning any variation on themes such as landscape, seascape, townscape, skyscape etc.

It was a very open topic with a variety of interpretations, but one chosen specifically to attract a wide entry.

The resulting entry of 62 digital images and 45 prints, spread over both monochrome and colour sections, and split between both intermediate and advanced members, gave our judge a particularly onerous task.

Fortunately, we had the pleasure of welcoming Dorothy Flint from the Western Society to judge for us - she’s one of the most experienced and qualified photographers in the island who proved well up to the task.

She has an excellent eye, takes enormous effort and time to consider every image presented to her, and whilst her comments were necessarily brief, they were very much to the point.

The prints proved particularly competitive, with very high quality images across the board - albeit a real difficulty for our judge in differentiating her marking.

Jonathan Carey’s entry in the intermediate colour prints of a well balanced and busy image of the Port of Livorno narrowly winning favour over two images of Venice from Claire Scheuder.

However, Claire then took honours in the intermediate mono prints with another image from Venice, this time of the Basilica of Santa Maria Dell Salute, with Beryl Quayle closely following with two images from a trip to Liverpool. In the advanced prints section, a number of images were awarded top marks of 20 in both the mono and colour sections - Sue Blythe and Jeremy Broome-Smith in Mono and both joined by Ruth Nicholls for the colour section.

However, Dorothy chose images by Jeremy in both sections as her favoured selections for the evening - a landscape in the colour section (’View Over Conors Pass’) and a lakeside image in the Mono (’Ashness’).

It was a similar story for the digital sections, with the same authors always in close contention for the judge’s preference - Jonathan Carey’s lovely image of the blue domes of Santorini scoring highly in the colour intermediate section, with Janet Henry and Beryl Quayle providing close competition, while Claire Schreuder won favour in the mono section with another image of the Basilica in Venice with Richard Shafto and Janet henry close behind.

In the advanced section, Jeremy Broome-Smith completed a clean sweep of all sections, his image of Scarlett Point gaining preference in the colour competition with images from Ruth Nicholls, Sue Blythe and Nigel Owen closely following, while Jeremy’s image of the Dingle Peninsula took honours in the mono, with images from Sue Leeming and Sue Blythe providing close competition.

Club President Chris Blyth gave a well earned vote of thanks, with special thanks to the competitors for providing a really excellent set of images for all to enjoy and for the judge to ponder on.

The society meets at the Art Society Building (Thie Ellyn) in Withington Road, Douglas, with all meetings starting at 7:30pm.

Our next meeting on Wednesday, December 5, will be the judging of our second open competition (both prints and digital).

Meetings are open to the public, and all will be given a very warm welcome. Full details of our programme can be found on our website at www.iomps.com.Chris Blythe

’Dingle Peninsula’ by Jeremy Broome-Smith gained Best Digital Image in the ’scapes’ assignment competition