CCC Forum

The annual monochrome competition will be held on 24 October, when the judge will be Jay Charnock FRPS. The competition is for new work only and must not have been used in any previous club competition, but it will be eligible for inclusion in subsequent monthly competitions and the exhibition. The Bamber Trophy will be awarded to the contestant who submits three images which achieve the highest aggregate score.

Entries can be made in one of three formats:

• Print
• DPI
• Slide *

The three images do not have to be in the same format and can be a mixture, for example one DPI and two prints. DPI entries should either be handed in on CD/DVD or memory stick at the previous week's meeting on 17 October or sent via e-mail to croydoncameraclub@gmail.com to arrive by midnight on Saturday, 20 October 2012. DPI images must be JPEGs in sRGB format with maximum dimensions of 1024 x 768 pixels. Prints and slides should be handed to the competition secretary by 7:45 on the evening of the competition. The competition is run as a single class, so on this occasion entrants do not have to state whether they are in the Advanced or Standard classes.

The competition rules are available in the printout distributed with the club bulletin at the start of the season or can be viewed on the website - http://www.croydoncameraclub.org.uk/WebSiteArchive/CCC_OfficialCompetitionRules2012.pdf.

The definition of monochrome is:

Monochrome means traditional "Black and White", as well as meaning a single colour, such as Sepia. If there is even a slight hint of an additional colour, the image is not regarded as being monochrome. e.g.: a "Black and White" image with a single traffic light displaying green. This rule is strictly enforced.

* The rule that slides must be the original film without any digital manipulation applies.

UPDATE: The original title for this post suggested that the competition is being held in November, rather than October, although the correct date was shown in the body of the message. I have amended this in both the posts I have made, but Davidc's entry will still show the wrong date in its title.

Though I don't intend on entering it, I have other images in mind, would this count as monochrome?


Sea Fan Silhouette (edited) by cedarsphoto, on Flickr

There is only one colour - blue - the rest is black/white, so it could be argued it's monochrome in the same way sepia is.
Personally I wouldn't class it as monochrome but just wanted to check what the limits were generally taken to be.

Short answer - no!

Monochrome means a single colour and in photography usually refers to images in which there are only greyscale tones, i.e. black, white or grey. Your image is black, white, blue and a hint of magenta, and is quite clearly polychromatic. It is acceptable for a mono print to be toned overall with a colour such as sepia, which is why the rules state that this is permissible, but it has to be across the entire image. A photo which was half greyscale and half sepia would be categorised as being colour since it would consist of two tones.