This was the first round of the Farnborough Photography Club’s PDI Trophy competition of the season held on September 17th 2026. This round had “Open” as both themes.
This season the club have a revised scoring system for the leagues: First, Second, Third, Highly Commended, and Commended images.
For each image I had to choose a roughly defined “genre” with the added condition that each submitted image must have a different “genre”.
Ballet shoes
Kate had taken a timeout from posing and sat on the floor so that I could take a close up of her ballet shoes.
I selected “Still Life” as the genre – simply couldn’t decide which one to use!
Summary of judge’s comments
… I like the intent on this [image]
… as I talked about before the photographer has made it clear what he wants us to look at, do you see? The bright part here – that’s what we need to be looking at
… I like the idea here, you don’t need to see all of the person , all you need to see is the hand, the feet and the knee , and that’s great. The way the other foot is tucked away works well
… we see these ballet shoes being tied, it is quite an interesting study , informative for those of us who do not know about what the dancers have to go through to put these shoes on
There were 23 images in this Open Round and the image received “Highly Commended.”
Results table N/A
The Stare
I asked Irida to look at me so that I could take some simple portrait shots. This was the first portrait of the set and is definitely one of my favourites.
I selected “Portrait” as the genre . . .
Summary of judge’s comments
… I think you have captured the engagement and that expression very very well
… you could interpret the expression in different ways […]
… it is a bit on the bright side on her face but I do like the way her face is framed, again there is no doubt what we [should] be looking at
… this is about the expression, we are looking into her eyes and you are seeing all of the expression
There were 23 images in this Open Round and the image received “Highly Commended.”
Results table N/A
The original images
Ballet shoes
The stare
