New Westminster Photography Club

This is a new online feature for the 2007-2008 year!!

Theme shooting (some clubs call it "assignment shooting", "interpretive photography", and other terms) is a time proven way to improve your compositional and technical skills. We've done it in the past at NWPC and decided this year to bring it back with an online twist.

Part composition, part judging, part competition, the monthly NWPC Themes consist of a "theme statement" that members seek to interpret with their photographs.

The first phase of a theme is the "critiquing phase": Members critique the submitted photographs as an individual work, identifying strengths in the compositions and offering suggestions on how to improve a particular shot (with editing/cropping) or techniques to improve those kinds of shots in general. Photos are displayed without any title or indication of who the submitting member is. The idea is to remove all distractions and influences on your opinion.

When a theme closes to submissions, it enters the "competition phase". The titles the photographers gave to their photos are revealed. Members can now make further comments in terms of judging the photo within the context of the theme statement. (This is how many inter-club and community competitions are judged). Again, members might comment on how the image interprets the theme, and how improvements can be made.

While receiving all this feedback, the member is also giving it out. Learning how to critique and judge a photograph. ("critiquing" and "judging" are two separate things!)

During the week following the closure of a theme, it is in "voting phase": members are voting to choose their pick for "Photo of the Month" for the theme -- adding a little fun to the mix. Ideally we want to see votes for those images that best interpret the theme as well as being the best image ... not always an easy thing to balance! No doubt there will be lots of discussion on how the voting went when the results are close!

To encourage voting based on the merits of photos rather than wanting your own image to win, a member cannot vote for their own images. Even if they truly feel it is the best one of the lot, but if that is indeed the case, they will win regardless because everyone else will be voting for it.

Once the photo of the month is chosen, the theme is "complete". Now when the theme gallery is viewed, all is revealed. Members can read the comments left by others on all photos, learning how others have viewed the image. The artist's names are shown, possibly surprising you as to who submitted which image. And the virtual "ribbons" are made available on the winning photos (first, second, and third place, based on vote count) as well as in the member's "biography" page in the Member's Only area. We currently allow multiple winners in each position to keep things simple.

Our themes attempt to help you with your photograpy in the following ways:

• photographical observation: viewing your surroundings through the "lens" of the theme statement,
• practising composition: getting out and actively working on composition elements in your photographs, we ask that photos submitted be taken during the open theme timeframe,
• inspiration: seeing how others interpret a theme helps you see other ways of looking at a situation,
• peer review: sometimes we are the worst judge of our own work, reading critiques can help us see ways we didn't think of to improve our shots, and build confidence by hearing the strengths that are in our images that modesty prevents us from seeing; we have a lot of very experienced members -- having their feedback can be very valuable,
• critiquing: learning to see what elements strengthen or weaken a composition, we can apply those observations to our own works,
• judging: a slight mind-shift from critiquing, consideration of the image in terms of theme conditions and how effective the original artist was in interpreting the statement (and receiving judgement comments shows us how others were interpreting the theme, which may have differed from yours),
• friendly competition: our themes allow us to practice for competitions (e.g. selecting an appropriate title for our image, taking time to apply a critical eye and select the best image out of the "hundreds" we took!) all without the pressure of "having to anticipate the judge's preferences", this is all about having fun and learning from our fellow members. "Photo of the Month" provides recognition of your efforts by your peers within the club.