It is always a pleasure to welcome Eddie Fryer to the Isle of Man Photographic Society.

He has been a regular visitor to the club over the years, and is a popular judge who gives a meticulous assessment of each image presented in competition.

This week he was judging an open digitally projected image competition - ’open’ in the sense of any subject being possible.

This makes it particularly difficult for a judge in that he (or she) has to make the winning decision having perhaps been shown some excellent images across a wide range of genres - and how to decide between a portrait or a landscape, a natural history shot against a still life?

Eddie can always be relied upon to show much good sense, explaining in detail his thoughts on each image, and clarifying why (in his opinion) one shot is better than another.

Michael Howland won the standard mono class with a lovely close-up shot of a pied wagtail, while Peter Keena took the honours in the standard colour group with a wonderfully colourful landscape image, the shape of the hills creating delightful lead-in lines to the brilliant oranges and yellows of vegetation in the foreground.

Beryl Quayle led in the intermediate mono section with an evocative image of sheep on a hillside, backlit, the landscape regressing into the background in muted shades of grey.

Jiri Podobsky, meanwhile, showed his talent in the intermediate colour class with a portrait image of two youngsters playing accordions, the colours and composition well balanced in the image.

A large entry in the advanced mono section proved highly competitive, Chris Nicholls emerging as the winner with a lovely vertical format image of a woman in a narrow alley, the textures of decaying plaster on the walls well shown, and the woman nicely balanced in one corner by laundry hanging from a washing line in the opposite corner.

The advanced colour section was similarly very competitive, with some top quality natural history images taking the top four positions, any one of which could have been the winner. However, a delightful image of a female merganser by Chris Blyth came out in first place, also taking "best image in competition".

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, February 14, will include presentations by Chris and Ruth Nicholls on France and Secrets of Sicily respectively.

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 Blyth