A walk around Shere

Last night at our camera club meeting (on zoom) we had a bit of an eventful evening. A few weeks ago when the competition theme was 'people' and the judge took that to mean more than one person, and in doing so disqualified any image that was of a single portrait, our club chairman assured all the upset members that next time he would make the mandate very clear to the judge whenever we have a themed competition. Last night our competition theme was  'architecture' and so our club chairman made sure he had told the judge in advance that this included all buildings or any aspect or part of a building. When the meeting started last night our chairman repeated this to the judge but despite that the judge went on to say that more than half the entries were not architecture images but more 'pictorial' images - as some had reflections in them, or more arty types of compositions - and he ignored the brief he had been given and went on to judge all the images extremely harshly, being so nit picking and pedantic and giving hardly any positive feedback at all. As a result the members were very upset last night, especially the beginner class as he was totally unreasonable with his judging, expecting a higher standard than a beginner is capable of. One of my entries was of London buildings and there were clouds in the sky and the judge said he  disliked the clouds, they were distracting and should have been removed! (Although the image ended up getting shortlisted and received a 'highly commended') This morning the poor chairman was inundated with phone calls, emails and texts from very upset members, many who said they had been totally de-motivated and requested the club never use him again. The judge was a highly regarded, well qualified judge, who is actually a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. You can see why camera club judges can get such a bad reputation for being nit picking and unreasonable. He certainly was all stick and no carrot, not a pleasant experience for anyone. He also was long winded and very slow, and it ended up being a late night as went over his allotted time. 

Today was another beautiful bright and sunny day, and thankfully that cold wind had dropped. I walked with Xena in the woods after breakfast, came home for a coffee, and then left to meet a friend in Shere for another walk followed by a pub lunch. It was the perfect day for it, and sitting outside in the warm sunshine for lunch was a lovely experience. My first pub outing this year!

Shere is a chocolate box pretty Surrey village, it has been used as a film location many times, notably for The Holiday and Bridget Jones : The Edge of Reason which both used the 12th-14th century church for scenes, the spire of which can be seen in this image. It gets rammed on weekends with day trippers, tourists, walkers and cyclists and even today on a supposedly quiet Tuesday morning it was rather busy. 

Tonight is our camera group meeting, but this is a more relaxed group of parents from the boys' school who meet monthly, no critical judges involved!