The Second Open Digital Competition of the year has been held. Our judge for the evening was David Kneale, the chief photographer for Isle of Man Newspapers.

But this was a competition unlike any other ever held by the Isle of Man Photographic Society, as the society experimented with a new procedure for judging the images.

Our competition secretary (Jeremy Broome-Smith) explained that the judge had not seen any of the photographic images before the night and would be given very little time to decide which were the first six images in each of the six categories to be judged.

He told us that this is the procedure used by must photographic societies in the UK to judge their competitions:

1. Each image is viewed for 5 or 6 seconds with no comments from the judge.

2. Then each image is shown again for about one minute while the judge makes his comments.

3. The judge then picks the six best from up to 12 of the competition images and in less than a minute ranks them in order from 1st to 6th.

David welcomed this method of judging as it saved the judge a lot of time viewing and reviewing the images before the competition night.

He had no difficulty in making all the snap decisions required in a very tight timeframe. Lara Howe won first places for her images in both the Standard Colour and Monochrome sections with ’Stonechat’ (colour) and ’Ring tailed Lemur’ (mono).

In the Intermediate Class Joy Brodie won first places with ’Sunrise, Dune 45, Namibia’ (colour) and ’Sydney Opera House’ (mono).

In the Advanced Colour Class our judge admitted to some difficulty in deciding on a winner as there were several outstanding entries that could have won, the best images being in 6th place ’The Eagle is landing’ (a spectacular wildlife image by Sue Blythe), 5th ’And he walked away’ (an amazing image of a car crash by Jeremy Broome-Smith), 4th ’Cascade’ (a water abstract image by Barry Murphy), 3rd ’Tulip Staircase’ (An exquisitely photograph looking up a spiral staircase by Sue Blythe), 2nd ’View from the Artist’s Window’ by Jeremy Broome-Smith and 1st place was awarded to Barry Murphy for an unusual image of two horses viewed from ground level ’Miss Elle & the Duke’.

Judging the Advanced Monochrome section proved equally difficult as there were so many good images to pick from.

Barry Murphy came up trumps again, being awarded the first two places for ’Silencio por Favor’ and ’A Bit on the Side’. Our judge gave the award for the Best Shot of the Competition to Barry Murphy’s Monochrome image of drill bits, titled ’A Bit on the Side’.

The overall verdict on the new method for judging the competition was very positive and it will no doubt be used again. However, the audience was left wondering if the results would have been similar if the judge had been given a few hours, rather than a few minutes, to examine the photographs. No one will ever know!

The society meets at the Art Society Building (Thie Ellyn) in Withington Road, Douglas, with all meetings starting at 7.30pm. Meetings are open to the public, and all will be given a very warm welcome.ã??

Full details of our programme can be found on our website at www.iomps.com.

Sue Jones