Young Photographer 2014

Although I am in the privileged position of Consort to the DGE, and expect to spend much of the next 12 months at glittering VIP receptions, I like to show sometimes that I haven’t let celebrity go to my head, and that I can still get involved in ordinary Rotary work.  Hence I organised this year’s YoungPhotographer competition.

Most of the hard work was done on November / December, when I wrote to every school in Spelthorne,  providing details of the competition and encouraging them to get pupils to enter. Each entry has to comprise a portfolio of three photographs on a given theme. This year’s theme was ‘People.’ I collected the entries from participating schools and delivered them to Stuart Scott of Staines Rotaryclub, who was our judge. 

There were some excellent entries, and Stuart was very impressed overall, although a few failed to appreciate that when a portfolio of 3 photos is required, there have to be three photos. Also, the three pictures within that portfolio should hang together, rather than just 3 unrelated images.  Worse still one was missing an entry form altogether.

After some deliberation, Stuart did decide on a 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd prize winner who won £50, £30 and £20 respectively. In the senior competition this year one school, Bishop Wand C ofE school in Sunbury scooped 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd prizes.  They were naturally very excited about this achievement, and I attended an awards ceremony at the school with our president, Doreen Pipe on 24^th April to deliver the prizes and hand out participation certificates to everyone. These beautiful certificates were printed by Paul and Julie Venn of Peter James Printing Ltd in Shepperton and the pupils were delighted to receive them.

At the ceremony, Toby Miller, headmaster, introduced everybody, before I gave an outline of the competition, how the winners progress to the District round, and if successful, to the National final. I handed over to Stuart who gave the pupils some feedback on their entries, what he was looking for in judging them, and how they might do better in future. Before the ceremony he had also spent an hour with year 10 pupils, leading a workshop on taking photographs for competition .

Then I handed over to Doreen to hand out the prizes and certificates.  Obviously as the most senior Rotarian in the room, it should have been me, but annoyingly I don’t yet have an official chain of office. So to make the newspaper pictures look better, I let Doreen do the presentations, even though she is only a President, simply because she has a chain of office and I don’t.  I‘m determined to rectify this anomaly before long.

As a footnote to the above, the event wasn’t covered in the local newspaper, even though they sent a photographer, so I have no pictures of the event to show here.   I could have done the prizegiving after all !