This week we were delighted to invite North Berwick Photographic Society to Fisherrow for the “Match an Image” competition. The competition was judged by Simon Wootton of Midlothian Camera Club. Images were displayed in pairs, and Simon’s task was to judge whether the second image shown matched the first, and in the case of a match to judge which was the better of the two images.
North Berwick started the competition with a strange, distorted shape which turned out to be the reflected image of the bow of a ship. Musselburgh responded with an image of a laughing duck which, astonishingly, was declared a match because the duck’s beak and tongue had a similar shape! Musselburgh responded with the first of a series of John West paperclip creations: a grid of paperclips. North Berwick replied with their image of an array of prayer wheels, which contained the same number of rows and columns. Another match! The evening continued with North Berwick challenging us to match their variety of telephone images and Musselburgh challenging them to match our selection of indoor abstracts. We got lucky when North Berwick shows us a picture of the glowing balls at Newhailes House & Gardens which we matched with a picture of some light bulbs. North Berwick flummoxed us with their arctic scenes, as we had no snow scenes in our collection. The best we could do was try to match their polar bear with an otter (another animal on water, although not necessarily frozen). At the tea break North Berwick were just ahead by 16 points to 15.
In the second half we hit them with a series of flower pictures which gained us a few match points and bonus points. But they replied with a series of animal images that became harder to match as we ran out of examples. Then we exchanged some portraits. Carol Edmond’s portrait “Hi There” was matched but declared the best image. It became harder to match images in the second half, but Simon also wanted to reward the high quality images that were coming up, so the matches became more tenuous. Yes, we matched their silhouette of a soldier holding up a gun with two hands with our image of a kayaker battling the rapids and holding a paddle. But they matched our image of a man on a tricycle in an alley with a street image because the diagonals were the same. By the end Musselburgh clinched the competition by 33 points to North Berwick’s 29 points.
Thank you Simon for some entertaining judging. It was great fun. Thank you to everyone who submitted their images for this competition. You helped us win it! Next year we’ll be travelling back to North Berwick.
- Unfortunately, the speaker we had booked for Thursday, 28th November can’t make it. So next week we’ll either have a Members Evening or something Derek can put together at the last minute.
- Derek is arranging a photoshoot at the National Museum of Scotland this Saturday morning, 23th November, at 10:30am. If you’d like to come, please meet Derek in the foyer some time between 10am and 10:30am. Let’s hope the snow holds off.
Musselburgh Camera Club 