EAF PDI Championships 2023
Held at The Fulbourn Centre, Cambridge on Sunday 12 February 2023
I attended the PDI Championships yesterday and had hoped to report that we met with at least some moderate success….
A total of 25 clubs took part this year. The Championships consist of 2 rounds. In round one, each club enters 15 PDI’s which are shown alongside those from the other competing clubs, one each per club in sequence until all 325 images have been shown. There are three judges, each of whom marks electronically out of 5, with no commentary, so the maximum an image can score is 15. Each image is displayed for around 10-15 seconds and then the score is read out. The number of top scores is very low, whereas the number of 9’s and 10’s is quite high! A 12 is regarded as a pretty good mark. The lowest any image scored was 8 (not one of ours!)
At the end of round 1, the scores are totted up and the 10 top-scoring clubs from within the Federation then go through to round 2, where the process is repeated with 10 different images per club.
I understand that, during the 17 years of the PDI Championships, it has been won on no fewer than 16 occasions by the Beyond Group!! http://www.beyondgroup.info/
It was always going to be a challenge even to break into the top 10, which invariably (and consistently) includes not only Beyond Group but PICO, Cambridge, Ipswich and Colchester Camera Clubs. It will therefore come as no surprise that we didn’t manage to reach the final 10. In fact, it pains me to report that we came 24th equal with Maldon Camera Club on a lowly 149 points (i.e. equal bottom!) By way of consolation, two clubs scored 152, two others scored 153 and there were a couple of 154’s. By comparison, after round one, Beyond Group had a score of 185 and the second-placed club PICO had 183!
So overall it was a very disappointing and upsetting day. It was difficult to get a grasp of what the judges were after, although Natural History images – mainly those of hares fighting and buzzards fighting – seemed to find favour! In the past there’ve been some amazing images of African wildlife, polar bears, penguins etc but not this year. There were lots of photographs of hares – more than any other Natural History image in fact. Abstract images didn’t do very well and by and large neither did ‘themed’ portraiture or creative images. Landscapes generally didn’t score well either, even though some were really super images. One of an Icelandic beach scored 15 – but it was a cracker!
It wasn’t the result that I’d expected at all, as many of the images we’d entered had done quite well in other external competitions. On the day however, it just wasn’t to be. From here, the only way is up! We’ve got a few more external competitions coming up shortly where we certainly hope to do a lot better. Despite the result, I’d like to express my grateful thanks to the members of the External Competitions Selection sub-committee who give so freely of their time and expertise to look at and give their thoughts on our potential competition entries (of which there are many) before finalising our entries. Let’s hope for better luck next time….
Richard Burn LRPS CPAGB
External Competitions Secretary