It's Photography, Jim, ......

[Mike Farley]

Earlier today I went to the the Royal Academy's Summmer Show and I would say much of the work exhibited there was of a similar standard to the IPE shortlist. Some was good, while others made you wonder what the rejects must have been like. The RA has been accepting photography for a while now and the selected images could have straight from the RPS competition. In the context of club photography, most would not have made the grade. Part of the fun of going around the show was seeing what had sold, the highest form of appreciation in my view. A lot of pieces had red stickers and people had paid some surprisingly high amounts for artwork to which I would not give house room.

These are the two top photographs, both of which won cash prizes of £1,000. The first was the winner of the Rose Award for photography and the exhibited print has sold for £250. If you rush, at the time of writing 40 out of 50 limited edition prints at £150 each remain, so you might still be able to snap one up.



The other image won a British Institution award for student exhibitors who submitted paintings, works on paper, sculpture and architecture. I am sorry to have to inform you that you have missed the opportunity to purchase as both the exhibited work has been sold for £750, as has the complete limited edition of 5 at £600 apiece. The reproduction on the Internet does not do it justice, of course.



You can see some of the other photographs included in the exhibition at this link: https://se.royalacademy.org.uk/artwork/ ... eymour/957.

Clearly, we do not know much about art and in terms of making money from photography just do not have the right approach.

[Iggy]

So many lovely images in the RPS short list of 158, including those by Melanie Eclare and Gillian Hyland with plenty of Lightroom work and those by Liming Zhong capturing nature's wild side needing to be at the right place at the right time! Must take a more leisurely look at them again.
Iggy

[Mike Farley]

The winners of this year's RPS competition have been announced. None were in my own selection from those in the shortlist.

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/la ... edal-62286

[Mike Farley]

As I was in in the area, I went round the RPS International Print exhibition yesterday. There is some good work, but I felt it got rather lost amongst the rest of it. The winning shot is OK and there is symmetry and contrast between the people and the paintings behind, but I have no idea why it succeeded above everything else. Lesley Goode from the RPS was there and she said that it was picked unanimously by the selectors. Good print quality accounts for a lot, apparently.

Mind you, there was another exhibition being held at the same venue, which had the merit of making the RPS show look good. What is striking is the difference in the type of images which are selected for the biennial members' exhibition. It makes it seem that the RPS is out of step with its membership. Or is it that the membership is out of sync with contemporary photography?

[davidc]

Garbage IMO. I can just about count on one hand the number I think that are worthwhile.

[Mike Farley]

Garbage IMO. I can just about count on one hand the number I think that are worthwhile.

For some reason, these kinds of people shots do well in this competition. Last year an image of a group sitting on some rocks by the sea was awarded a bronze medal and I have seen other similar efforts do inexplicably well. For some reason, I cannot generate a link to the page and the shot is too big to embed in the post. Not that anyone is missing much by not being able to see it.

[Mike Farley]

I have not been able to find a copy of the family group on rocks image to which I can link, but it can be accessed from thi link. The photographer is Damien Wootton.

http://rps.org/exhibitions-and-competitions/exhibitions-archive/international-print-exhibition/international-print-exhibition-157

I have found last year's winning shot by a photographer under 30, which equally illustrates the point about images of groups being favoured.

[Peter Boughton]

Mike, replacing the { and } with %7B and %7D respectively gets around a bug in the forum's BB code handling preventing the direct link from working...

Local Family, Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, Northumberland - Damien Wooten

(Without going into details, all text characters can be expressed in a percent-encoded form, which is used by URLs and other places.)

[Mike Farley]

Mike, replacing the { and } with %7B and %7D respectively gets around a bug in the forum's BB code handling preventing the direct link from working...

Thanks for the explanation, Peter.

[davidc]

http://davidcandlish.photography/news/2 ... -relevance

Had a think about it. While I still don't personally like a significant majority of the shots, maybe "Garbage IMO" was a bit strong. Even though I don't personally like the majority of images, it's not the images themselves I have the problem with, it's the potential message the RPS has given with this selection.