Monthly Competition Results

Monday 15th June 2026
Judge: Simon Street FRPS, FIPS

Thank you to everyone who submitted images to the competition. 23 members took part, each entering two images. It meant that there were 46 images for us to look at and enjoy and for the Judge to critique.

It was Simon's first visit and he was a superb judge and gave us all lots of advice that will help us to improve our photography. 

Simon was genuinely impressed  with the quality and variety of the images in both the intermediate and advanced competitions. He held back 19 images that were given a score of 9 or above. 12 of them were in the Advanced competition, exactly half of the images. This is something that Simon has never done before.

Congratulations to all those members who had their images held back and that were subsequently given a score of 9, 9.5 or 10.

INTERMEDIATE

MJAMES - CUBISM - 10

RATAN - OFF THE BEATEN PATH- 10

BILL- SEE NO EVIL - 9.5

RAJINDER - HELIX IN STEEL - 9.5

JAMES - ASYMMETRY- 9

RAJ - THE QUIET ASCENT - 9

RAJINDER - SHADES OF RED - 9

ADVANCED 

SAM - A RAINY DAY ON THE LONDON EYE - 10

ANDREW - REED BUNTING - 10

AJIT - ORCHID CANDY GIRL - 9.5

AJIT - TWO TULIPS - 9.5

DAVE - BACK FLIP INTO THE SEA INBRIGHTON - 9.5

PRADHEEP - LITTLE SPA QUEEN - 9.5

SATISH - BEAUTY IN THE BANAL - 9

DAVE - MOODYLONG EXPOSURE VIEWOF THE SHARD - 9

KIM - POSH FRONT ROOM - 9

Our First Ever AI Judged Competition RESULTS - Monday 24th November 

Thank you to everyone who took part in this experimental AI judged competition. 

Apologies that one members images got missed on the night. I have now run those through the Chat GPT software and added them to the results.

Stephen Wilder created the competition using the standard SPA 15 point scoring system and with no separation of our usual intermediate and advanced classes. All images from both classes were mixed together.

The AI critique given was very detailed, and was split it into the following categories:

Composition and framing

Lighting and Exposure

Technical Quality

Creativity and originality

Emotional impact/atmosphere

Presentation

It gave scores for each, followed by an overall score and a Judges Summary.

Theoretically it could give scores from 1 to 15. Fortunately, nobody scored a 1. The lowest score it gave was an 8 and the highest a 14

Congratulations to Dorothea and Andrew who had the two highest scoring images of the night, both scoring 14 marks.

Dorothea with a beautiful minimalist abstract

Andrew with a superbly captured Migrant Hawker in flight.

There were a number of images that scored 13 marks

Andrew Great Crested Grebe and Perch

Dave Coloured light from inside the cheese grater

James Late Night Laundry

Dave Back flip dive into the sea in Brighton

The majority of images scored 10, 11 or 12

Only a handful of images scored 8 or 9

Generally, the critique seemed accurate and comparable to the sort of comments an actual SPA judge may make.

(Although Elspeth disagreed on some and told AI her opinion.)

AI judging used the word" POTENTIAL" a lot in its critique summaries for each image.

So one of the big takeaways from last night is that We ALL have the POTENTIAL to produce GOOD/GREAT and successful club competition level images.

As Stephen Wilder suggested last week, AI critique can be an excellent learning tool and it also has great POTENTIAL itself, if it is used as a "mentor" prior to entering images into competitions.