The latest meeting of the Isle of Man Photographic Society proved a very successful introduction to the competition programme with more than 70 entries for the first Open Digital.

The evening also saw the introduction of a new scoring system, with all images given a score out of 20.

There were four sections being critiqued - Intermediate and Advanced groups each split into mono and colour images.

Our judge for the evening saw the return of Doug Allen - a long-term favourite of the society who has judged on a number of previous occasions.

His comments are always carefully considered, concise, well researched and supportive of the entrant whilst his scoring was well calibrated and consistent.

The first section - Advanced Colour - saw a series of extremely high quality images, particularly of natural history subjects - with five images from 4 different authors (Jeremy Broome-Smith, Sue Blythe, Dianne McCudden and Barry Murphy) all gaining a maximum score of 20, the judge unable to separate them in terms of technical excellence.

Only on the judge’s personal preference did Jeremy’s image ’Peregrine with Prey’ get the winning nod.

The Advanced Mono section was again won by Jeremy with a sports action shot of two grass track motor-bikers racing neck-and-neck. A superb image from Sue Blythe of a tiger’s face very close-up and with every hair clearly seen ran a (very) close second place, in turn hotly pursued by images from Sue Leeming and Barry Murphy.

The Intermediate Colour section saw new member Claire Schreuder winning on her maiden outing with a colourful image of two ladies taking a picture of flowers decorating two houses, their dresses mirroring the colours of the walls. Lara Howe’s red squirrel feeding on a wet day took second place.

The final section - Intermediate Mono - saw two images gaining scores of 19 - an old lady accordion player by Jonathan Carey and an image of the Steam Railway engine ’Kissack’ from Mike Howland, with the latter gaining the judge’s favours. Beryl Quayle as always proved a strong competitor with effectively the third place score.

Whilst Jeremy’s image of the peregrine taken on the island was judged the overall winner on the night, the close competition - in all sections - and quality of the images augurs well for a highly competitive season with some great shots in prospect. Doug Allen’s performance as judge also gained a well-deserved round of applause.

Our website at www.iomps.com includes full details of our programme.

Meetings are held at Thie Ellyn (the Art Society building) in Withington Road, Douglas on Wednesday evenings starting at 7.30pm, with the next on October 31 being a digital presentation of a folio from our federation, the Lancashire and Cheshire Union, to be followed by members showing some of their images from Isle of Man Photographic Society events.

All meetings are open to the public, non-members with a modest entry charge, and all will be made very welcome.

We look forward to seeing you there....