News - Report: Internal Competition - Phil Atkinson Versatility Trophy

19 January 2012

Well hopefully those of you who turned out to see the inaugural running of this competition will agree with me that it was a great success? Certainly Clive did a tremendous job in assembling the collective entries into the five individual rounds of the competition and Nigel performed the task of judge for the evening with great aplombe. It was a great evening and a lot of fun to participate in and to watch.

So what exactly is the Versatility Challenge?
The premise of the competition was to challenge the photographic versatility of the membership by setting five subjects, one per round, and then challenging club members to find a suitable entry for each round from their vast back catalogue of images, all the images entered must have been from existing stock.

So what were the subjects?
After a fair amount of deliberation Nigel arrived at Abstract Angles, Straight Lines, Curvature,From Above and 3D Patterns. As well as setting the subjects Nigel also gave a brief description of his thoughts behind each subject.

So what happened?
At the closing date for entries to the competition we had submissions from 16 club members, so with 5 images per entry Nigel, our judge for the evening, was faced with the daunting task of judging a total of 80 images over the five rounds.

The first three rounds were viewed and scored before the tea break and although the names of the highest scoring authors were read out at the end of each round no one really knew who the overall leader was. The final two rounds were viewed and scored after the break and, following a brief interlude while Clive calculated the scores, the overall winner was announced.

So who was it?
Following much calculation and recalculation the winner, the member who scored the highest aggregate score from all five rounds, was announced as Paula Ley with a total score of 91 points out of a possible 100. The competition was very close though and Paula won by the narrowest of margins! In second place, with a total score of 90 points, were Geoff Einonn, Trevor Evans and Simon Raynor. Looking at the overall scores the difference between first and last place was only 9 points!

So what were Paula's winning images?
For those of you who weren't there here is Paula's winning hand, along with their scores:

Round 5: 3D Patterns
Tuscan Morning by Paula Ley (19/20)

So what images won each round?

The images chosen as being the best for each round are shown below. There was only one image which scored 20 in each round except for round 5 in which two images scored 20:

So there you have it!

You can see Paula's winning images and the winning images for each round in the competitions section, along with the results.

Well done to Paula for winning the first Phil Atkinson Versatility Challenge Trophy competition and thank you to all who entered for making it such a great success. A bigthank you to Clive for getting the entries sorted out and for running the competition so efficiently and a final thank you to Nigel for providing the soundtrack for the evening and for managing the judging so admirably.

Here's to next years competition, full details will follow closer to the time but in the meantime get out there and take as wide a range of photographic subjects and styles as you can, who knows what subjects next years competition will bring!