The ‘Annual’ is our final major competition of the year, where members can show off their best from the whole season. The standard of entries was extremely high, and judge Rob Davis gave an excellent assessment of every image.

Rob awarded the trophy for Best Image of 2023-24 to Dale Powell for his stunning monochrome print of an African Grey Parrot. The details in the bird’s feathers and bill were superb, all shown off with top quality printing. This was one of three of Dale’s images that scored 20 points. Congratulations Dale, well deserved!

However, Dale wasn’t our only photographer to have maximum scores in the images. Jim Stevenson, Martin Clark and Colin Robinson also receiving top marks for images.

All in all, the club can be very pleased with the high standard on display and can look forward to representing Scotland in the Photographic Alliance of Great Britain’s projected image final later in July.

While there was a wide range of different images presented in our 2nd Open competition this year, judge Colin McLatchie from Eastwood Camera Club gave several of the honours to wildlife images. Top of the bunch was Jim Stevenson’s shot of a Crested Tit (above) – and certainly it’s a great capture. This projected image lifted to trophy, while Kevin Thorne had the best monochrome print, an abstract entitled ‘Mary’s Shell’ of an artwork off the Lancashire coast, and top marks for the best colour prints was a three-way tie between, Jim Stevenson, Colin Robinson and martin Hancock.

Below we show another top marks projected image for a more exotic bird – a Panama Flycatcher, which Ian Johnstone had captured while on holiday in Costa Rico.

Continue reading “One for the Birds” →

For once, the club abandoned all those DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, devoting our late January meeting to focus on images taken by our Smartphones. Well, we got a good deal of entertainment viewing over 50 images presented by members covering all subjects from Landscapes to Portraits, from Dogs to Snowmen to Graffiti and Street scenes. 

The general opinion of all in attendance was of an excellent quality in these images, even when displayed on the large screen – even when photographs were taken at night or in lower level indoor lighting.  The images were taken with a variety of different phones, of different ages and a full commentary given by those members contributing to the show.

Finally, an open discussion on the various Pros and Cons of taking photographs with Smartphones concluded that smartphone image quality is only set to improve further and this needs to be counted into our club programmes for future years.

A few of the images are presented below:-

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At the Scottish Photographic Federation (SPF) digital image competition on Sunday 19^th November, Kilmaurs Club took first place in the prestigious Bowie Trophy competition and won the Gold Medal.

An audience of around 200 watched the judging of entries from 37 of Scotland’s photography clubs, with 13 of these putting themselves forward for the most prestigious “Bowie” competition.

On the day, our final entry included images from 8 members. In general terms, the marking was strict with very few images achieving high scores 13-15. However, 9 out of KPC’s 20 images were awarded more than 12 points. Dale Powell ‘s “Wren on a Bullrush” led the way with a top score of 15, and this won himself a Bronze Medal in the “Judge’s Choice” category. Congratulations to Dale!

Our total score was 249 just edging out the other competitors, and there was mounting excitement as the results were announced.

Club president John Sommerville commented “We suddenly realised we were in the top three, and were absolutely delighted when we were then announced as the winners of the trophy!” Thanks are due to Jim Stevenson for selecting our entry – good choices Jim!

The win qualifies the club to represent the SPF at the British (PAGB) Championships in May next year.

Here is a link to the SPF website for a Gallery of our winning images and more details of the results.
2023 SPF Digital Bowie Trophy Winning Club | Scottish Photographic Federation (scottish-photographic-federation.org)

Our first Open Competition of the season was won by Ian Mortimer with this terrific dog portrait titled ‘Mac’.

Charlie Moore from Eastwood Photographic Society was our judge for the evening. In total there was an entry of 30 prints and 50 projected images. The standard of photographs was characteristically high and a total of 5 images were given the full 20 marks. Jim Stevenson and Joyce Robinson achieved the 20 mark standard with their prints. Other top marks were given to two other projected images – another image by Ian Mortimer “First Catch of the Day” and Dale Powell’s “Old Hands” (see below).

But overall, Charlie awarded the trophy to ‘Mac’. Congratulations to Ian, and thanks to Charlie for his constructive comments and wise judging.

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