FPS Photograph Of The Year By Kevin North

Sue Dee, organiser of the FPS Photographic Competition, writes:

The 72 photographs from 30 entrants were judged by Chris Castle, an award winning photographer with over 30 years experience.

Chris is an Associate of the Disabled Photographer’s Society and has won a number of awards including a Silver Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) for an exhibition of floral close-up work.

She has been placed twice in the RHS Annual Photographic Competition. Her work has featured in many magazines as well as on greeting cards and wedding stationary. Several of her Fleet Pond photographs were recently used on the BBC South weather slot.

Chris commented on the high standard of the entries to this year’s competition and on how much she had enjoyed judging: ‘Judging any competition is very subjective so this is very much my opinion only, and only on the day that I judged them.’

As well as photographic skills, Chris was looking for the ‘Moment to Remember’. In other words, a photo that stands out as unusual, it could be the light, the weather, the quirkiness of particular circumstances. In other words, something that is different cannot be repeated tomorrow and therefore ‘memorable’.

Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who entered. The winning photo is shown above and those that were highly commended follow, along with Chris’ comments.

The overall winner is a terrific photograph by Kevin North (above) that stood out from the crowd. The squirrel stopped on the way up the tree and looked straight at the camera and this moment was caught beautifully. Very good composition and focus with good colour and depth.

Highly commended photos were:

Dave Driscoll‘s photo in the snow, not a common sight in the south of England, is sharp and well composed and has a magical quality that snow gives to any scene.

Aaron Gee has managed to capture the elusive kingfisher in an unusual pose. There is good composition and depth of colour.

It was so nice for the heron to pose by the fishing sign and Mark Hodson has captured the moment perfectly. A sharp and well executed photo and great fun.

Daryl Scriven has the deer looking at the camera – not easy to capture, especially this well. He has made the most of a great opportunity.

Liza Toth has a fantastic light with the mist – light like this can change any minute. A well composed and a lovely and peaceful picture.

The Annual General Meeting of Fleet Pond Society
 will take place at
7.15pm on Saturday 18th February 2012 at the
St. P & J Church Hall, Kings Road, Fleet.

We would like to encourage Society Members to attend, as this is your opportunity to put questions to the Executive Committee and to share your views on the future of Fleet Pond Nature Reserve.

Following the official business of the AGM, there will be a short break for refreshments, before we announce the winners of the

Photographic Competition 2011.

We hope that everyone who has entered will be able come along to see their photographs on display.

After the reports on the news, I was expecting a significant downfall of snow last weekend but instead we just got a thin layer. Nevertheless I took the opportunity of taking a few snaps for the record.

Quite attractive in it’s own way!

(Click To Enlarge)

Fleet Pond has appeared in a previous issue of Hampshire Life – see here.

Permission to reproduce the above article has kindly been agreed by Hampshire Life.

Enjoying Potatoes (Cooked In The Fire) With Butter And Cheese

The Sunday volunteer event on January 8th had another good turn out. As mentioned in a previous post, the aim was to remove birch scrub and saplings from the Dry Heath area. it’s amazing how fast they grow back!

The weather was fortunately very good. When we were at the same area previously, the pond had partially iced over. Of course, last year snow was everywhere.

The fire (for burning the cut scrub) was started early so that we could all enjoy a baked potato or two at the end. We also had a mid-morning snack as well of course – volunteers get treated well 🙂

The picture above shows a part of the completed task – not a sapling in sight! It’s actually quite impressive what a group of people can do in a morning, which is why these volunteer events are so useful for the upkeep of the Pond.

Of course it’s not all work, it’s great just to meet fellow volunteers and to get an catchup as well as to (sometimes) discover unsuspected common interests!

A good example of this was a random chat I had with a colleague which lead on to talking about the Danish TV series currently showing on BBC4, Borgen.

Screenshot From The TV Series Borgen (BBC4)

From this, it turned out we both had a strong common interest in Scandinavian crime fiction (Mankell, Larsson etc). Another colleague who had overheard us chatting then joined in as he had previously worked with a Swedish company and had got interested in the genre that way! It’s amazing how a few random sentences can develop into a really interesting conversation. Anyway, I’m looking forward to discussing these matters further…

Hope to see everybody at the next event on 

Sunday 12th February.

All new volunteers are very welcome!

If you are unable to come to volunteer events but would like to help support Fleet Pond Society, please consider joining (details on the tab above). We’re always very keen on new members!

Picture credit: here.