Last night saw the completion of the Western Cape Interclub Photographic Competition for 2017, at an event held in the CR Swart Auditorium at Sanlam’s head office in Bellville. Helderberg Photographic Society were the hosting club, perhaps for the last time as there are moves underway to move to more collaborative  management of the competition; rather than having a single club responsible each year.

The evening commenced with the exhibition of print entries opening for viewing. These prints had been pre-judged a week prior to the final event. The prints will remain on exhibition in the gallery there until 17 November.

After snacks, drinks and the chance to catch up with old friends from other clubs the audience took up their places in the auditorium and the rest of the evening commenced, under the capable guidance of Bernard Seymour Hall. Thank yous were said and some spot prizes awarded before the three winning audio-visual presentations from the AV Challenge were shown. Then it was on to the live judging of the projected images following an AV previewing a selection of the entries to give the judges an impression of the overall nature of the work they were about to judge. As always this AV was produced by Antenie Carstens but due to the larger number of entries did not include all images. Antenie has also produced a full version that runs for 25 minutes and is available by contacting him.

Our judges were Jean du Plessis, Melanie Cornelius and Hansie Oosthuizen and image display and scoring were facilitated by Bennie Vivier of Tygerberg Photographic Society using the TOP system. This allowed the judges to move through the entries quickly and smoothly. Once the judging was completed there was an intermission during which time the scores were copied from Bennie’s computer into a spreadsheet on mine that calculated the various winners. I had brought along a small printer and we were able to print the winner’s names on the certificates and hand them out during the prize giving immediately before everyone went home for the evening. And now, the information you’ve all been waiting for; the winners.

The winning clubs in the print category were

1. Helderberg Photographic Society – 278
2. Tygerberg Photographic Society – 266
3. Tafelberg Fotografieklub – 265

and in the projected category were

1. Tygerberg Photographic Society – 282 points
2. Tafelberg Fotografieklub – 275 points
3. Helderberg Photographic Society – 274 points

with the overall winning clubs being

1. Helderberg Photographic Society – 552 points
2. Tygerberg Photographic Society – 548 points
3. Tafelberg Fotografieklub – 540 points

Christo Giliomee was the star of the competition, winning the print category with “Goodnight” a striking portrait of a leopard, which was also selected as their favourite print by both Jean du Plessis and Hansie Oosthuizen. This image was also judged best wildlife image, winning Christo a fantastic pair of Bushnell Binoculars from Tothills. This was backed up by a second high scoring image, giving Christo the highest accumulated score with 53 points, and winning him an R8,000 Manfrotto tripod from Orms.

Johan Beyers was the winner of the projected category with his fantastic image “Power Falls” that I’m guessing may have been taken in Iceland. We may try to tell ourselves that it is Johan’s ability to travel to exotic locations that frequently sees him among Interclub winners but of course subject is just a small part of the making of an amazing photograph like this.

Both Johan and our own Danie Coetzee were close runners up for overall top scoring photographer, each scoring a total of 51 points. Each of Danie’s entries was selected as a judge’s favourite, “Everything has an end” being Melanie Cornelius’ favourite print and “Fantasy” being Jean du Plessis’ favourite projected image.

The other projected images selected as favourites were Magda Frylinck’s “Running in Radiant Rays” selected by Melanie Cornelius and Niël Goslett’s “Family portrait” selected by Hansie Oosthuizen, which also came in third in the projected category.

The full scores and results can be viewed online at Interclub 2017 Final Results and from there downloaded in your preferred format.