Shaftesbury Camera Club

SCC has been invited by Blandford Forum CC to participate in a three club “Match-an Image” competition later this season. The last one of these was in November 2014 again hosted by Blandford where we came 3rd having won (… just) the year before: read our brief report here.

These notes are to help newer members to understand how this fun competition is run and to help them provide us with suitable images.

At the start of the evening, each club has to be prepared with 40 PDI’s loaded on their own laptop and projector. One club will then project one of their PDI’s as a “starter” image: the other two clubs then have a strict time limit of 30 seconds to select and project their “matching” image. The judge (who is often the victim of considerable good-natured banter) then has to award marks as follows:

• The “starter” image automatically gets 1 mark
• “Matching” images get 1 mark each if the judge agrees they match the starter
• The judge awards a further 1 bonus mark to the best quality image from the starter and valid matches
• If none are judged as matches, the starter gains a bonus of 1 mark

The three images used in each round cannot be used again in subsequent rounds. Each club takes it in turn to provide the “starter” image and there are a total of 30 rounds. Hence each club provides 10 starters and 20 “matches”, and will have 10 unused images at the end.

In addition to our laptop, projector and 40 PDIs, we will have our PDIs printed as contact sheet and clearly numbered to help make our rapid choice of matching images before the disqualifying 30 second time limit. Used images can be crossed through with a black pen. As a minimum on the night, we will need two members to choose the images, one to run the laptop and one to keep score. Additional members can help by challenging the unfortunate judge!

It should be clear that our 10 “starter” images need to be difficult for other clubs to find a “match” but our “follower” ones need to be general enough to match all sorts of others.